When I was of primary school age, nothing made me so happy as accompanying my mother on her weekly shop. I didn’t get to do it often – during school holidays or the occasional late night shopping expedition on a Thursday. There was magic in those aisles of the Franklins in Sydney’s inner west. By being with Mum, having her ear, I could influence the selection, ensure she didn’t forget the tub of Neapolitan ice cream or jar of fish paste (otherwise known as Peck’s). It was a nervous wait, though, when the cashier tallied up our groceries. Mum requested regular subtotals, held back certain items we could survive without that week if we had to. If the amount on the till exceeded the notes in her wallet, Mum removed those things from the trolley, and we left without them.
When I was living in London as a paralegal in my early 20s, trips to the local Sainsbury’s, a short walk across the common from my rented bedsit, were a chance to feel connected in a city that otherwise alienated me. These grocery shopping outings were done on weekends with fellow Antipodeans, living abroad for a year or more. Our budgets were limited then too. Potatoes, baked beans and jars of pesto were staples, and we swapped recipe ideas for cheap dinners, all of us conserving our money for cheap flights around Europe.
When I was a young professional, back in Australia, working long hours in a proper job, I did my supermarket shopping late on a Monday or Tuesday night. Wearing a suit and heels, carrying a red basket over one arm, carefully selecting healthy greens and packets of frozen fish, I felt grown up and responsible for the first time in my life. Wandering up and down the quiet, cool aisles at 9pm, I noticed other young professionals like myself. Though none of us spoke, I sensed a common understanding, an air of vitality and invincibility: we were busy and important. That this hour was our only time for grocery shopping was proof of that.
A few years later, in my early 30s, I was in my first serious relationship. Trips for groceries with my beau were infrequent and normally preceded a camping trip when we’d stock up on packets of instant carbonara and chocolate pound cake. The supermarket became the place where I imagined what our lives would be like as our relationship progressed to the next stage: cohabitation. I couldn’t wait to buy toilet paper and dishwashing liquid together.
Then came my mid-30s and the dream, naïve as it was, was shattered after I was permanently injured. I married my partner, but with my mobility now limited there were no pleasant strolls to the local fresh food market on a lazy Saturday morning as I’d envisaged. Luckily for me it was the advent of internet shopping, which I embraced with gusto. Doing the grocery shopping online became my way of exercising control over a life that otherwise had none. I stocked up on paper towel, mineral water and liquid hand soaps, avoiding ordering fresh produce which often arrived soft or limp. We had rows of these other products lined up along the floor and stacked in the top shelves of kitchen cupboards. It was convenient and empowering but also isolating, and I missed my excursions to the supermarket that had never felt like a chore.
I recently moved back from Canberra to Sydney after 17 years away. I was ready to come home, I missed my family. I never expected to find myself, though, shopping for groceries on the same busy Victoria Road where I’d spent countless hours as a high school student waiting for the school bus. My first visit to the supermarket was during the early afternoon. I experienced an unexpected sadness pushing the trolley along the tinned fish and canned fruit aisle. It was about 2pm, school was still in, and I saw that almost everybody in that shop was old and grey and stooping. At the checkout, I observed the clear joy these elderly shoppers derived from their conversations with cashiers (the few of them who are left alongside the self-serve checkout machines). Sitting in the car afterwards I waited as my husband packed our purchases into the boot. We were parked on the street a short distance from the supermarket. An elderly lady, dressed all in white, with a white suit and white heels and jewellery, was slowly wheeling her trolley bag full of groceries across the road in front of me. From the careful way she had dressed, I imagined the trip to the local shops was a highlight of her week. I felt my own increasing age, my middle age, keenly that day.
Afterwards I thought about my changing relationship with the supermarket, how it has reflected my joys, hopes and dreams, my trials and disappointments. At each stage, I’ve tended to view the place, the other shoppers, through the lens my mind wanted me to see them through at that particular time. The supermarket as an organic entity that changes for the hour of the day and the customers who enter its doors: a trove of childish delights, later cool and detached, later still a place to find conversation when opportunities for human interaction become scarce. I mentioned my shopping experience to an old friend from Sydney. She advised me to go to a different supermarket next time as the one I went to was too sad for her as well; there was one with younger clientele further up the road. As if by not seeing the lonely pensioners, we might fool ourselves that it wasn’t going to be us one day too.
• Cynthia Banham is a writer and visitor at the ANU’s School of Regulation and Global Governance. She is the author of the book A Certain Light
