Paper short abstract:

One crucial part of everyday life routines is shopping for groceries. In our presentation we will focus on the vast variety of materialized micro processes that takes place in shopping for daily commodities. Using our empirical findings we will describe how the supermarket is a highly choreographed space.

Paper long abstract:

One crucial part of everyday life routines is shopping for groceries. In a Danish context the shopping primarily takes place in a supermarket close to the home or the working place. Our presentation takes its point of departure in a joint project on 'The Interactive Grocery Shopping of the Future', where our ethnological contribution was an extensive ethnographic fieldwork on the present practices of grocery shopping in Denmark. In our presentation we will focus on the vast variety of materialized micro processes that takes place in shopping for the daily commodities. Using our empirical findings we will describe how the supermarket as a choreographed space and a spatio-temporal space (Massey 2005) through the routes and the movements of the customer becomes an individual path. This path transforms the supermarket from being a space into being an individually performed place (De Certeau 1984). Additionally, we will focus on the situations of choice in the supermarkets as processes of distributed agency and as co-constituted (Shove et al. 2007) by the performed space, material objects and multiple uses of the senses as well as absent and present family members. These hybrid agencies configure the micro processes performed in making the supermarket into an everyday practice of shopping.