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Silvia Binenti
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“People are going mad”. A disjunctive comparison of rituals of grocery shopping at the beginning of Covid-19 (March-June 2020)
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Silvia Binenti
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“People are going mad”. A disjunctive comparison of rituals of grocery shopping at the beginning of Covid-19 (March-June 2020)
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                                               2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 29-56




“People are going mad”
A disjunctive comparison of rituals of grocery shopping at the
beginning of Covid-19 (March-June 2020)

Silvia Binenti
University College London




Abstract: At the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the act of loading shopping
carts more than usual materialized as a sensible choice for most shoppers. Yet, stockpil-
ing was constructed in parallel to the social pathologizing of so-called panic buying. Panic
buyers emerged as supermarket “loose cannons” who seemed to create an “indecorous”
spectacle out of what is usually considered an unremarkable act of everyday life. In this
context, through the disjunctive comparison of experiences of grocery shopping in Italy
and England, this paper looks at material cultures of preparedness and moral cosmolo-
gies of everyday consumption as they acquired social salience during the first few months
of the Covid-19 pandemic (from March to June 2020). The rupture of everydayness al-
lowed to appreciate the ritualistic aspects of grocery shopping and highlight their role in
the temporal, social and moral ordering of everyday life.

Keywords: Covid-19; Grocery shopping; Supermarket; England; Italy; Ritual




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Silvia Binenti
“People are going mad”. A disjunctive comparison of rituals of grocery shopping
at the beginning of COVID-19 (March-June 2020)
2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 29-56.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5212
30	Silvia Binenti

Prelude
   It is the 11th of March 2020, and I am looking for toilet paper in an Aldi
supermarket in Cambridge, UK. Amelia, the woman I am shopping for, told
me I would find it at the back of the store. I look at the £15 cash she gave me
and walk down the busy aisles. The toilet paper was recently restocked and
arranged directly on the floor (figure 1). I uncomfortably grab three 12-roll
packs, the maximum amount I am allowed since the store introduced a limit
on the number of key items customers can buy.




                            Figure 1: Toilet paper rolls in Aldi


    The rolls are too big to carry, so I put them in a ripped cellophane bag I find
flying around the aisle. In this extremely clumsy attempt, I have the anxious
feeling that people are staring at me. As I walk towards the cashier, I wonder
if I am projecting my self-judgment onto other shoppers. While I wait in the
queue, I am relieved at the sight of what I superficially assume to be other
panic buyers.
    It is my turn. The cashier looks at the toilet paper, looks at me and then
calls the store manager. I am about to burst out and say: “Don’t worry, this
isn’t for me. It’s for a woman in a wheelchair who is waiting outside and asked
for help. I wouldn’t panic buy, I’m a researcher.” The affirmative nod of the
store manager saves me from this pathetic confession. Instead, I smile awk-
wardly, pay and walk out. Amelia, who is waiting for me in her wheelchair


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“People are going mad”                                                            31

already loaded with bags, tells me: “Hurry up, don’t let them see you.” At that
moment, my suspicions turn into certainties. I know she has already bought
the packs she was entitled to and needed someone to buy more for her. Me. As
I put down the rolls, I can see more toilet paper at the bottom of her shopping
cart (figure 2).




                    Figure 2: Amelia’s shopping cart outside Aldi


                                           ~

Introduction
   This article explores material cultures of grocery shopping in England and
Italy during the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic (from March to
June 2020). While scholars have long recognized that a focus on everyday
consumption holds the potential to bring salient social relationships and cul-
tural processes to light (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1987; Campbell 1995), grocery
shopping remains a much under-researched aspect of everyday life. The the-
oretical construction and empirical exploration of emergency consumption
allowed me to turn the pandemic into an opportunity to conduct novel re-
search on everyday material culture as it acquired new salience under unique
circumstances. In a time of crisis, the veil of habit that makes ordinary prac-
tices such as grocery shopping unnoticed, or even invisible, to the native is



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32	Silvia Binenti

suddenly lifted. In the face of emergency, supermarket provisioning can be
more easily unmasked as an extremely socially charged activity.
   Before the outbreak of Covid-19, with a few exceptions (e.g., Kulemeka
2010), emergency consumption had been approached almost exclusively from
a quantitative point of view (see Beatty et al. 2018; Tsao et al. 2019; Dulam et
al. 2020). As the topic gained more attention, today the still scarce yet rapidly
emerging literature mainly falls within the remit of survival psychology (e.g.,
Arafat et al. 2020; Yuen et al. 2020; Lins and Aquino 2020; Taylor 2021), risk
and disaster management (e.g., Arafat et al. 2021; Loxton et al. 2020; Prentice
et al. 2020), supply chain studies (e.g., Bentall et al. 2021; Dulam et al. 2021;
Hall et al. 2021; Islam et al. 2021) and media studies (e.g., Ahmad and Murad
2020; Barnes et al. 2021; Leung et al. 2021; Naeem 2021). The anthropological
approach of this paper thus aims to contribute to a research gap that is par-
ticularly difficult to fill in “ordinary” times. This seems increasingly relevant
as, just two years later, once again images of empty supermarket aisles repop-
ulate media reports due to supply chain disruptions as a consequence of the
war in Ukraine.
   In early March 2020, I compared supermarket shelves and people’s shop-
ping carts during the early phase of growing demand across the main retailers
in England targeting different consumer groups (Asda, Tesco, Waitrose, Marks
& Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Aldi). During this period, beyond hours of “pas-
sive” observation, I talked to shop assistants and managers at different stores
in Cambridge and interacted with several shoppers as they walked around su-
permarket aisles, waited in line to pay, or loaded bags into their cars. With
many of them our interactions were limited to me taking photos of their
shopping carts and a few relatively brief exchanges that at times were eth-
nographically interesting due to their blunt nature and defensive tone. With
a few others, more meaningful interactions were established as I accompa-
nied them on their shopping expeditions. With three of them, we exchanged
contact details allowing for their contribution also during the second part
of my empirical work when, after a re-assessment of health-associated risks
and the ethics of social distancing, in mid-March I interrupted in-person re-
search. I then conducted phone and video interviews with a diverse group of
participants from Italy and England (around 20 participants with additional
contributions from some of their family members and friends). Aside from
my initial supermarket encounters in Cambridge, English and Italian partic-
ipants were recruited through my extended personal network among people



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“People are going mad”                                                          33

who may have been affected differently by the pandemic and lockdown mea-
sures. I asked my informants to take note of their visits to the supermarket
as different restrictions were enforced between March and June 2020. These
“shopping diaries” represented a key starting point for conversations and a
way to capture participants’ personal impressions while these were still fresh
in their mind. Participants took note and shared their reflections on shopping
and consumption by using different formats, from handwritten journal entries
to WhatsApp texts and voice messages. The latter were particularly popular
among my Italian participants, who generally perceive this medium as more
personal compared to other forms of messaging (Taipale and Farinosi 2018).
The casual format of voice messages, as well as the “live” element to them,
meant that participants had less room to edit and overthink their observa-
tions. Some messages were recorded while interlocutors were in supermarket
queues, in a store’s carpark or walking home from their shopping expeditions.
So, while it was no longer possible for me to walk around supermarket aisles
with my participants, WhatsApp messages allowed for some “instantaneous-
ness” in my research.
   The geographical focus of this research, initially dictated by personal
circumstances and issues of access, opened up a productive space for compar-
ison. By borrowing Lazar’s (2012) concept of “disjunctive comparison,” here
cross-country observations are not made for the sake of finding differenc-
es and similarities between two anthropologically incommensurable social
contexts. The point is to let such disjunctive material talk to each other and
create opportunities for reflection. Like me, moreover, some of my partici-
pants experienced the pandemic transnationally in both Italy and the UK,
whether directly (i.e., having repatriated during lockdown) or indirectly, for
instance through diasporic kinship or transnational business activities. Here,
the metaphor of the Cassandra complex as conceptualized by Benussi and Zhu
(2020) is particularly enlightening and analytically handy. In relation to the
spread of Covid-19, the Cassandra complex refers to the temporal experience
of diasporic Chinese and Italian nationals who saw the state of emergency
rapidly develop in their home countries, while witnessing passive attitudes or
delayed responses in host communities. Diasporic Cassandras – burdened by
the gift of prescience – found themselves in different viral temporalities and,
as I will argue, also in different consumption temporalities due to positional
discrepancies in their experience of the pandemic. For instance, I met one of
my participants – an Italian national studying in Cambridge – while she was



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34	Silvia Binenti

walking around the supermarket with a “prophetic” shopping list put together
by her mother in Italy to warn her about what items were likely to sell out.
My empirical material is thus essentially disjunctive across time and space.
Different viral temporalities and localities are put in conversation in relation
to disparate consumption experiences in the face of the same travelling virus.
   As a diasporic Cassandra experiencing my own temporal and spatial rup-
tures, I found myself entangled in multiple dimensions of positionality,
starting from my role as a researcher, concerned bio-citizen and supermarket
shopper. I soon discovered that I was not the only one trapped in subject-ob-
ject ambivalences in their construction of knowledge and understanding of the
pandemic. My participants, by their admission, tended to do a good amount of
self-reflection on their own and were particularly interested in making sense
of their experience of the unfolding pandemic with me. As life suddenly decel-
erated due to lockdown measures, many found themselves pondering at home,
engaging in what Anderson (2004) termed folk ethnography. At times intrigued,
and at others disorientated, by their new lifestyle, most participants seemed
interested in the art of people watching in the attempt “to navigate uncertain
terrain but also as naturally curious human beings inclined to make sense of
their social habitat” (Anderson 2004: 23). This mechanism helped overcome
boundaries between researcher and informant and favoured a more inclusive
production of knowledge. Reflections on consumption were particularly com-
mon among my interlocutors given that grocery shopping often represented
the only social activity outside the space of the home people engaged in. The
supermarket became the main venue of observation and investigation for
both my participants and me, and a key site of socialisation, even when this
consisted of socially distanced interactions.
   Ultimately, my analysis does not aim to draw general lockdown trends or
make broad cross-country comparisons between anthropologically incom-
mensurable socio-cultural contexts – this was not the point or within the
scope of this both time-limited and time-sensitive research during a period
of great personal and collective uncertainty. This disjunctive material is not
meant to be reconciled in a way that can be generalised or comparatively ex-
tended beyond my observations during an exceptional time limited to the first
few months of the pandemic. The material I present in this paper may even
appear too anecdotical, although by now we should be able to appreciate the
long-nurtured value of anecdotes and the way unique instances, encounters
and experiences can enrich our understanding and inform our thinking. The



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“People are going mad”                                                          35

research, moreover, is clearly embedded within my own personal experience
of the pandemic as we collectively and intensively pondered over this extraor-
dinarily peculiar time of our existence. On the one hand, in this paper I aim
to offer a perspective on the great analytical potential of the pandemic as a
rupture of the ordinary that allows us to study the salience of the mundane.
On the other hand, the main themes of this paper can be treated as a starting
point for further qualitative research on ordinary and extraordinary rituals of
grocery shopping beyond the current pandemic. The quotes I selected for this
paper are meant to help recall something that participants, readers and I as
the author can most likely relate to or have come across during the first few
months of the pandemic. This could also feed into a different conversation on
the practical limitations of formalised research and the value of experimental,
autoethnographic and even organic or spontaneous research, especially on
mundane issues of everyday life.
   By focusing on material cultures of grocery shopping and by grasping an op-
portunity to conduct research on the anthropological ambivalences between
the apocalyptic and the prescient, this paper is organized as follows. I first
provide an account of consumption cultures of preparedness and consumerist
practices of panic. This allows me to locate consumption within discourses
on millenarianism and to trace the moral construction of grocery shopping
as an ordinary act that ought to remain so – in this sense, prophetic mate-
rial cultures of emergency and preparedness seem to clash with the moral
and temporal order of everyday grocery shopping. I then consider the order-
ly aspects of consumption as tangible sources of comfort and mechanisms
of control. In doing so, I explore the ritualistic aspects of shopping during
Covid-19. Finally, I bring attention to forms of conspicuous consumption that
became accentuated and discursively evident in a moment of crisis. This will
ultimately allow me to anthropologically re-socialize supermarkets as deeply
charged social places.

Viral and (un)reasonable orders of consumption
   When lockdown measures were enforced in the spring of 2020, even as
restaurant delivery services adapted to new regulations, supermarket provi-
sioning came to represent almost the totality of most people’s consumption.
Due to increased home consumption, less frequent trips to the shops, long
physical and virtual queues, and the contingency of having to self-isolate,
the act of loading shopping carts more than usual materialized as a sensi-



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36	Silvia Binenti

ble choice for most shoppers. However, practices of consumption in a state of
emergency were constructed in parallel to the social pathologizing of panic
buying in public narratives, popular discourses and academic writing. Nash
(2020) interprets panic buying as a form of “irrational exuberance” (see Shiller
2000). The term indicates a state of consumerist and euphoric myopia that
leads people to overestimate a commodity’s “true” value. In Marxist terms,
panic buyers thus engage in a form of commodity fetishism (with toilet paper
as probably the most fetishized Covid-19 commodity in Britain), whereby es-
sential goods acquire a new value independently from the resources involved
in their production, their material properties or actual functionality. This “vi-
ral” state supposedly prevents people from seeing the detrimental effects of
their consumption behaviour and ends up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Put simply, the allegedly irrational fear of a shortage of key goods ends up
contributing to their temporary unavailability on supermarket shelves due to
stockpiling. The theme of “irrationality” was also popular among my inter-
locutors when commenting on empty shelves. For example, while shaking his
head, a Tesco stock manager remarked that “people are simply panicking and
buying irrationally.” A Waitrose shopper – who spontaneously approached me
while I was talking to supermarket staff assuming I was complaining about the
store’s low stock – repeatedly emphasized that “people are going insane; they
take more than their fair share … It’s irrational. People are going mad.”
   As I approach the concept of panic buying, I am wary of writing off con-
sumers’ behaviour as simply “irrational.” During the early phase of growing
demand across supermarkets, most of my English interlocutors struggled to
make sense of the conspicuous absence of toilet paper on supermarket shelves.
Despite that, most of them would make sure to grab an extra pack before leav-
ing the supermarket. Aside from people’s cognitive biases in assessing their
shopping behaviour and the behaviour of others (see Jones and Nisbett 1971),
the expectation that people will stockpile supposedly makes the purchase of
extra rolls a rational choice. In the words of a shopper I met in Aldi: “Yes, we
are stocking. You need to, because you don’t know what will happen ... People
are panicking, so we have to stock up.” It is not just the expectation that others
will irrationally buy, but the expectation that others will rationally respond to
an expectation of hoarding behaviour by securing their own stock. Attempts to
distinguish orderly and rational consumption of preparedness from irrational
and impulsive consumption of panic are morally dubious and highly problem-
atic from both a discursive and practical perspective. Different moralities of



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“People are going mad”                                                                 37

material culture dictate what constitutes a sensible and healthy relationship
with material goods and distinguish “excessive” from “appropriate” accumu-
lation. In this regard, Kilroy-Marac (2018) looks at popular imaginaries about
collecting and hoarding in North America and the UK. Hoarders are qualified
as individuals unable to exercise control over things; they become overpow-
ered by the material world:
     The closeness they demonstrate toward their belongings seems inappropriate
     to the outside observer – too emotional, too absorbed, too blurred with the
     people themselves. From a non-hoarder’s perspective, hoarders appear to
     care too much and not enough, all at once (Kilroy-Marac 2018: 34).

   While hoarding is a clinically recognised condition, panic buyers are simi-
larly constructed as supermarket “loose cannons,” who misinterpret the true
value of goods; who are too concerned with stockpiling things and not enough
about others’ needs; who believe to be supermarket experts by managing to
secure goods but, in reality, ignore the appropriate shopping behaviour to be
adopted. This ultimately creates an indecorous spectacle out of what usually is
an unremarkable act of everyday life.
   Especially in the UK, the mediated construction of panic buying through
reportages of distressed supermarket staff (Mann 2020; Kale 2020), shoppers
fighting over toilet paper (Laws 2020; Christodoulou 2020) and health work-
ers in tears due to their inability to find food after long shifts (O’Reilly 2020)
created an apocalyptic picture of supermarket consumption. People are in-
creasingly used to the politics of emergency and proficient in the language
and aesthetics of apocalypticism, from sci-fi to conspiracy theories and radical
environmentalism (see Barkun 1990, 1996; Stewart and Harding 1999; Tos-
cano 2010). In this regard, Franco – an unemployed man in his early 50s from
Palermo (Italy) – offered a transcendental explanation of the pandemic and its
corresponding mode of consumption:
     You know the Lord … I don’t know if you believe. But I do believe. He put
     us to test to allow us to relish the taste of life again. Many people didn’t
     understand the meaning of life anymore. I see that people are now paying
     more attention to the small things of life. It was a nice message despite these
     disgraceful circumstances.

   In his view, alienating, fast-paced and self-destructive consumerism called
for divine intervention to let us “taste” again the pleasure of “consuming” life
together in a simple and modest way. This speaks to the man’s morality of
consumption and his views on the “appropriate” relationship with consumer
goods, largely rooted in Christian culture (see Parry and Bloch 1989). While


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38	Silvia Binenti

in Franco’s case the pedagogy and even the poetics of viral consumption are
based on moral and religious grounds, Felicity – a 60+ year-old woman from
the West Midlands (UK) who works several jobs as a chef – re-worked this apoc-
alypticism of consumption in political terms. In her shopping diary she wrote:
      I will explain why we chose not to panic buy. Over the past 12 months we
      have been gathering a few things together (tinned and jar items, tea bags,
      pasta, rice, etc.). Because of Brexit and the uncertainty of that. Little did we
      know worse was to come … In hindsight, it was a good thing because you ha-
      ven’t been able to get a toilet roll around here.

   This form of preparedness, which reflects Felicity’s perception of the geo-
politics of consumption, was largely derided by her daughter, Lucy, who was
keen for Felicity to send me pictures of her pantry (below) to show what Lucy
saw as consumption extravaganza and paranoia.
   Here research on “preppers” can be particularly telling. Preppers – often
defined as survivalists – are people who prepare for all sorts of emergencies,
from earthquakes to nuclear wars. They put a strong emphasis on DIY material
culture, and pantry stocking is most certainly an important element of prep-
ping. Huddleston (2018) notes that in the US, preppers are typically depicted
in popular culture as political or religious extremists. They represent a source
of suspiciousness and potential danger in public narratives. Huddleston, how-
ever, emphasizes that preppers – mostly consisting of fairly educated, young
people in full-time employment – tend to be community-oriented individuals.
The stigma around prepping aligns with Faubion’s (2001) account of contem-
porary views on millennialism. In his analysis, while millennialism represents
a comprehensive worldview and complex pedagogy, it is dismissed as lunacy.
This form of social stigma is also common among scholars, who largely adopt
a defensive behaviour and try to distance themselves from their millenarian
object of study:
      Some of its devices are transparent: rationalist mockery, bemused or belittling,
      which is content to dismiss as foolish or infantile whatever might threaten
      to reflect back to it the extra-rational grounds of its own complaisance; and
      that sort of behavioural scientism that rapidly weaves the feathery headdress
      of a psychopathological profile (Faubion 2001: 33).

   This resonates with the experience described in the prelude of me awk-
wardly buying toilet paper for Amelia and feeling tempted to self-identify as a
researcher to morally requalify my act of consumption and make my socio-in-
tellectual and class position somewhat self-explanatory.



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“People are going mad”                                                                         39




  Figures 3, 4, 5: Photos sent by Felicity picturing her well-stocked pantry ahead of Brexit



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40	Silvia Binenti

   By taking us back to the metaphor of diasporic Cassandras, Faubion
(2001: 18) writes: “The paranoid are the inheritors of Cassandra’s curse: their
suspicions meet with bemused dismissals; their knowledge falls on obstinately
deaf ears.” With regard to provisioning, both material cultures of prepared-
ness and forms of viral consumption or panic buying are largely pathologized.
Whether too methodically prepared or emotionally unprepared, they clash
with the unspoken code of everyday consumption, whereby supermarket pro-
visioning should be grounded between the temporal brackets of a reasonable
present. Prophetic supermarket consumption, in conclusion, is either suspi-
cious, psychotic or morally condemnable.

Consumption as order, control and ritual
    At the beginning of the pandemic, the emptiness of supermarket shelves
provided a strong visual signal that things were out of place or out of order
due to their very absence. Bille et al. (2010: 179) refer to this as the “ambiguous
materiality” of absence, namely the social presence of absent material bod-
ies. The absent body of things proves to have an agency of its own and looks
particularly conspicuous in the abundance of modern consumerism (Hether-
ington 2004). In the context of the pandemic, it symbolized people’s reaction
to a perceived threat. If commodities can signal a threat through their absence
on supermarket shelves, the hoarding of commodities can represent a way to
re-establish order through their presence at least on domestic shelves. Mate-
riality is therefore simultaneously configured as a cue of social (dis)order and
a tangible source of comfort – this is revealed in moments of crisis when order
is disrupted, and coping mechanisms are employed to re-establish such order.
    From a Freudian perspective, the hoarding of toilet paper and the anxiety
over its absence have been closely linked to people’s primordial need for or-
der (Halford 2020) and instincts of social survival (Kluger 2020). While I will
not go down the Freudian route, it is true that panic buying has been largely
interpreted both by experts and non-experts as an (irrational) control mech-
anism (Garbe et al. 2020). In her folk ethnography of Covid-19 consumption,
Lucy – Felicity’s 30-year-old daughter – commented: “As for panic buying, I
think it’s just hysteria. I guess that if you look at the psychology of it, people
can’t control the virus, but they can maybe control how they react to the virus
... It’s a fear of being out of control.” Along the same lines, contrary to the
growing trend among British consumers of less copious and more frequent
grocery shopping (KPMG/Ipsos Retail Think Tank 2018), a shopper I met at a



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“People are going mad”                                                          41

Sainsbury’s superstore in Cambridge remarked with a hint of pride that she
did not need to panic buy as she relied on a carefully put together weekly food
planner. Due to her skills in house management and supermarket provision-
ing, she felt in full control while grocery shopping. In her eyes, panic buyers
become constructed almost as “sloppy” and “disorganized” and stockpiling
emerges as a coping strategy for people who, unlike her, are not in control.
    If consumption is interpreted as a control mechanism, it is unsurprising
that my interlocutors in a vulnerable socio-economic position were more like-
ly to stock their pantries. Rosa – mother of three in her 40s – is part of the
informal economy in her small town in Southern Italy. She is an off-the-books
domestic worker and her husband is an off-the-books construction worker; if
they do not set foot outside the house, the family has no income to rely on.
As news broke about the first Italian cases of coronavirus, Rosa decided to do
some prepping. She claims to have bought 25kg of flour and 1kg of fresh yeast:
“I spent €500 at the supermarket, I took everything and more. From that day
it’s been almost four weeks. May the Lord bless us.” By contrast some of my
upper-class interlocutors from the same area ridiculed forms of supermarket
prepping and some of the precautionary measures employed by stores. Among
them, Giancarlo defiantly went to the shops daily despite official recommen-
dations and only wore a face mask in the stores where it was mandatory. His
wife commented: “Maybe it’s because I am not an anxious person, but I would
feel ridiculous living in fear of touching another person in the supermarket by
mistake.” While the couple did not change their shopping routine, they start-
ed buying more delicacies (sfiziosità) for virtual happy hours with family and
friends as afforded by their social class.
    Building on these links between consumption and control, anthropologists
have long appreciated the increase in ritual activities in moments of crisis
or socio-political distress (see Homans 1941; Kluckhohn 1942). According to
Douglas and Isherwood (1979: 43), consumption consists of a series of rituals
whose function is “to make sense of the inchoate flux of events.” Shopping
provides the infrastructure for the performance of such rituals. In line with a
classic structure of ritual, in the time of Covid-19, supermarket visitors would
wait in socially distanced lines – usually alone and in silence – marking their
temporal and spatial abstraction. Especially in Italy, where stricter measures
were enforced, this step would entail a prior preparatory stage aiding the rit-
ual with special gear, namely gloves and face masks. Once the wait is over,
shoppers would transit into the liminal space of the supermarket. There, they



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42	Silvia Binenti

would learn about the pandemic through a change in the material culture and
social experience of grocery shopping: one-way routes, emptier shelves, fuller
shopping carts, no cash, no touching, etc. In the suspended space of liminality,
shoppers would often end up grabbing a few extra goods and items would start
piling up in their carts due to the uncertainty of what is needed in a pandem-
ic and for how long. Finally, shoppers are ready for reaggregation through a
process of cleansing. As soon as they pay, leave the supermarket or step home,
they apply hand sanitizer or wash their hands. They sort the groceries away
and return to the familiar safety of the home. This ritualistic experience also
applied to consumers that did not physically go grocery shopping. In their
hand-written shopping diary, for example, Maria and Luca – an elderly couple
from Bologna – provided a detailed account of their collection and cleansing
procedure when their children delivered their groceries:
      Shopping bags are left at the bottom of the stairs. We greet my daughter or
      son from the window. Luca goes back and forth to bring all the bags into the
      kitchen. We lay a cloth on the kitchen table, which will then be disinfected
      and exposed to the sun. The bags are emptied onto the cloth and taken to an
      empty room, where they will stay untouched for three days.

    Similarly, online shoppers would long stare at their number in virtual queues
or endlessly refresh supermarket websites in the hope of finding an available
delivery slot, before performing their ritual of collection and ablution.
    This newly reconfigured and intensified ritual activity should be explored
in the context of the other rituals that people ordinarily perform. Among my
interlocutors, not only did the pandemic suddenly configure supermarket
shopping as a new rite of passage, but it also quickly defined new domestic rit-
uals of consumption while replacing old ones. Many of my Italian participants,
for instance, interrupted or limited their consumption of espresso, which they
largely associated with a quick pit-stop at their local café (bar). With lockdown,
life slowed down and so did the drinking of coffee, with teas and infusions be-
coming more popular. One Italian family even established a new ritual around
tea drinking, an item that would not normally feature in their pantry: every
day at 6 p.m., they would all gather around the TV, listen to the daily national
bulletin on the spread of the virus, and drink tea. Similarly, in connection to
her increase in alcohol consumption, Felicity – who during lockdown had her
25-year-old son, Oscar, back at home – described a new home ritual: “Every day,
by 4 p.m. Oscar will say ‘Should we have a beer or a glass of wine?’ Especially
when the sun is shining, this has become a very nice, new family tradition.”
These examples do not mean to reflect general consumption trends but speak


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“People are going mad”                                                          43

to the institution of new rituals of consumption within the family. The extraor-
dinary of the pandemic gave visibility to shopping and consumption as the
infrastructure for routinisation. In this regard, Mary Douglas (1972) highlights
the importance of sequence and the order of meals throughout the ordinary
week. Many of my interlocutors instituted new Sunday rituals of consumption
as a way to re-establish temporal control over the passing of days, especially
when household members did not have an occupation to attend to. One Italian
family would dress nicely for Sunday meals “as if we were going to church.” An-
other family, once restaurant delivery services became available, would make
the day special by treating themselves to a nice take-out meal.

Supermarkets as social places
   Grocery shops as liminal, ritualistic spaces might bring to mind Augé’s
(1995) interpretation of supermarkets as spaces of passage, what he calls
non-places. Anthropologically speaking, non-places represent anonymous
and socially sterile transit points that exist outside space and time. Together
with other places of passage produced by super-modernity – such as highways
and airports – supermarkets do not allow for identification and socialisation,
being “surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary”
(Augé 1995: 78). Supermarket visitors become anonymous shoppers; their
identity does not go beyond that of consumers. They walk around clinical
aisles, read impersonal labels, select mass-produced goods and hand a credit
card to a worker or self-check-out machine, before walking out to carry on
with real and meaningful social life. Contrary to Augé’s somehow outdat-
ed account, through the experience of the extraordinary my research shows
that the transience of places of supermodernity does not necessarily qualify
them as asocial. While it might be true that modernity “pushes them into the
background” (Augé 1995: 77), supermarkets still exist as places where social
relations and identities are formed and performed. After all, consumption, in-
cluding grocery shopping, has been interpreted as an inherently social activity
even in the world of mass-produced commodities (Miller 1995, 1998 and 2008)
and everyday material culture as having the ability to shape social identities
(Attfield 2000; Tilley et al. 2006; Woodward 2007).
   Similar to Rial and Goidanich’s (2012) ethnography of grocery shopping
in Brazil, in my research supermarkets are far from being meaningless places
of passage; they are a key locus of instant and pedagogic socialisation, para-
doxically even when this consists of socially distanced interactions. Some of



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44	Silvia Binenti

my participants came to see supermarkets as a source of entertainment, an
activity to plan for or fill the day with. Some of them strategically timed their
outings to maximize their opportunity to engage in an activity outside the
house. Supermarket workers in the UK reported that shoppers became more
talkative during the lockdown (Kale 2020) and a few participants even told
me about being involved in, or having witnessed, heated arguments in super-
markets. While in some cases the pandemic unleashed the social potential of
supermarkets, in others it betrayed the ordinary and often unconscious ex-
pectation of grocery stores as casually social places. One woman from Biella
(Italy), for instance, was deeply offended when she was prevented by super-
market staff from chatting (at a safe distance) with a friend she bumped into
because during lockdown people were not allowed to “shop together.”
   During the pandemic the supermarket was also experienced by most as
the only social place where to observe and study other people. Anderson’s
(2004: 21) description of folk ethnography as a (distanced) social exercise is
particularly fitting:
      The curious will sometimes gawk at strangers, but most often, people are
      polite and, from a safe distance, watch others unobtrusively, if indirectly.
      Others may be reluctant at first, only to find themselves unavoidably
      overhearing conversations that pique their interest; then they eavesdrop and
      collect stories, which they may either repeat to friends or keep to themselves.

   According to Anderson, this process represents the unconscious, forma-
tive experience that determines the foundation of our behaviour and code of
conduct in public. Under the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic,
shoppers – as folk ethnographers – appeared to be more receptive and alert
because, among other things, they had more to learn about themselves and
others. Monica, daughter of Maria and Luca (the elderly couple from Bologna),
noted that during lockdown she started remembering the faces of those she
happened to shop with, as well as supermarket employees: “Before COVID, you
didn’t know who was shopping next to you. Each one of us was on their per-
sonal ‘track.’ Now, you remember exactly who was walking around the aisles.”
   Building on this interpretation of grocery stores as social places, the super-
market also powerfully epitomizes and objectifies class relations, particularly
in the UK. Consumption has long been recognized as a status marker (Veblen
1899) and the source and expression of cultural capital and class (Bourdieu
1984). In the contemporary age of consumerism, the axiom you are what you
eat could be easily rewritten as you are where and what you buy. This largely
satirized element of the British class system became particularly evident in


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“People are going mad”                                                                  45

the early phases of emergency shopping across different retailers. Consider
the below photos of supermarket toilet paper sections, taken on the same day
at two stores located next to each other. The top photo was taken in Asda
– quoted in the Guardian (Jeffries 2004) as the store “for people who aspire
to have a second home anywhere but probably never will” – and the second
photo in a supermarket-only Marks & Spencer (M&S) – a store with the repu-
tation for appealing to upper middle-class sensibilities and pockets.




     Figure 6: Toilet paper section in Asda (Beehive centre, Cambridge UK) 12/03/2020




    Figure 7: Toilet paper section in M&S (Beehive centre, Cambridge UK) 12/03/2020


                                         2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 29-56
46	Silvia Binenti

   M&S is not generally considered a store where people buy in bulk and go
for provisioning of basic goods, although this store was particularly large and
very well-equipped. While bearing this in mind, in mid-March the experience
of walking out of Asda – where staff were already overwhelmed, and shelves
already half emptied – and stepping into M&S was to be turned into a pro-
phetic Cassandra.
   The material experience and the discursive formulation of supermarket
shopping radically differed across the two stores and participants from dif-
ferent social classes. An M&S shopping assistant, for instance, told me calmly
but with a hint of pride:
      All regular here, we did not have any problem with people stockpiling. I
      know that Tesco and other shops set limits on the number of items that you
      can buy, but not here, we don’t do that … Maybe we are running low of hand
      sanitizer, let me check … Yes, we are out. But I may have some in the back.
      People here are shopping as usual.

   Similarly, an elderly woman in M&S, who was buying fresh food with her
husband, when I enquired about her shopping experience, told me rather
abruptly: “We shop here every week … we are shopping as normal.” After I
thanked her for her time, she remarked again: “This is our regular shop. Just
shopping as normal.” The woman was almost offended that someone could
think that she was at her supermarket for anything other than her ordinary
shopping, or worse that she would engage in something extraordinary such
as panic buying. This highlights the class-related sociability afforded by gro-
cery stores and the stigma attached to prophetic modes of consumption as
explored in previous sections.
   Rochefort (2007) maintains that supermarkets as asocial places allow for
anonymous purchases free from the judgement of other shoppers. Consumers
rely on this sense of privacy to express and objectify intimate wants through
shopping. Yet, social anxieties and fears of shaming for personal consumer
choices at the supermarket became particularly evident during the lockdown.
During my fieldwork in Cambridge, shoppers with carts exclusively made up of
bulk and non-perishable goods denied doing some prepping. Others claimed
they were not thinking about coronavirus at all, when clearly the grocery store
already felt and looked very different.
   An Italian man I met in front of Asda in Cambridge with only toilet paper in
his cart, when I first enquired about his purchase, replied he had run out. Once
we mutually identified as Italians and switched to our mother tongue, he ad-
mitted he was buying toilet paper “because people were crazy buying it.” This


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“People are going mad”                                                                  47




  Figure 8: Carts of shoppers who claimed to be doing a non-pandemic-related shopping

consumption shame was less dominant in Italy, where supermarkets were less
sensationalized in public narratives of the pandemic. Having had the chance
to get to know her personality, I even suspect that Rosa – the Italian domestic
worker I mentioned in my previous section – exaggerated the amount of mon-
ey and quantity of food she was able to buy with a single trip to the shops. The
fact that she did not hide stockpiling but perhaps even emphasized the gran-
deur of her supermarket expedition speaks to her version of conspicuous
consumption. In this context, buying and not buying as well as buying what and
where figure as charged social choices embedded within a social class system
and qualify supermarkets as charged social places.

Conclusion
    During my fieldwork I met Amelia, the shopper from the prelude, for two
consecutive days in two different shopping areas. After our encounter in Aldi,
I met her again in Asda, where I helped her shop for her family and friends
(figure 9).
    She is a British-Jamaican woman in her 60s, who was a carer until 2014
when her health issues constrained her to a wheelchair. By her own admis-
sion, her precarious health and economic condition exacerbated her anxieties
towards the then-imminent pandemic. Amelia proved to be an expert in su-
permarket material culture by skilfully grabbing products, recognizing brands
and correctly guessing prices. However, in the extraordinary space of lim-
inality of the supermarket, she seemed to be inspired by whatever item was
running low and whatever she could glimpse in other people’s shopping carts,
keen to participate in the collective ritual of emergency consumption. After


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48	Silvia Binenti

Asda, she announced that we were going to the B&M store next door, in her
words, “to look for other stuff I need.” When I further enquired, she could
not to tell me what that was, signalling her moral rather than material need
for things as a source of control and comfort. While we shopped, she resort-
ed to religious and millenarian expressions such as “I pray that I’m covered
in His blood.” As we walked around supermarket aisles, people starred at her
overloaded wheelchair. Two young men walked past Amelia and one of them
giggled “That woman was covered in toilet paper” to which the other replied
“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. It’s insane.” While grateful for my help, Ame-
lia suspected that I was skeptical, or even judgmental, about her need to buy
more. When her friends insistently called and messaged her to add more items
to her shopping list, she told me: “See? I wasn’t lying yesterday. I have people
I need to buy and care for.”
   I met Amelia at the beginning of my fieldwork, but her story perfectly sum-
marizes the main conclusions of this paper. Using the pandemic experience
as an entryway to explore the taken-for-granted salience of everyday con-
sumption, I explored ritualized social and moral orders of grocery shopping
in English and Italian supermarkets. More specifically, I looked at prophet-
ic forms of consumption as responding to people’s cosmologies of everyday




                         Figure 9: Amelia after shopping in Asda


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“People are going mad”                                                           49

material culture. Grocery shopping and consumption have been interpreted
as rituals that morally and materially organize social life by giving people a
sense of order and control. The experience of the extraordinary allowed for
the anthropological re-socialisation of supermarkets as places where, among
other things, we may learn about others and perform what we want others
to learn about us. The rupture of everydayness helped highlight the salience
of temporal cosmologies of consumption. The tendency to pathologize pro-
phetic grocery shopping speaks to the normative construction of supermarket
provisioning as grounded in the temporal order of everydayness. Similarly, the
institution of new rites may facilitate the transition into a new present marked
by the pandemic and help cope with the idea of an unpredictable future.




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50	Silvia Binenti

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“People are going mad”                                                            55

  Silvia Binenti is an urban ethnographer interested in political everydayness. She
  is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at University College London (UCL) and
  graduated with an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.
  Her current research explores the relationship between politics, pop culture and
  materiality.
  silvia.binenti.16@ucl.ac.uk




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Silvia Binenti
“People are going mad”. A disjunctive comparison of rituals of grocery shopping
at the beginning of COVID-19 (March-June 2020).
2023 | Anuac. Vol. 12, n° 1, Giugno 2023: 29-56.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5212
