Keywords

The Spectacle of Scarcity

“I started just around when COVID was starting to hit”, Girish told me. Originally from Nepal, he studies accounting and works at my local supermarket in the Melbourne Central Business District (CBD). He’s been there since March 2020. “My first thought was, ‘one or two months and this will be gone’”, he said. That was 18 months ago. I’ve gotten to know Girish and his coworkers quite well since then. For weeks on end, they were some of the only three-dimensional faces I saw when I left my apartment for one of the four reasons permitted under Victoria’s stage-four lockdown: buying groceries. Below, I digest their impressions of the pandemic.

“It was funny”, Girish told me, “I had like an intuition, one day. I was just about to come to work, and the weather was a bit dark and gloomy. Weather like a scene from a movie. And I told my brother-in-law, ‘This is weird … I think something is going to happen’. And I came to work that day. And I think after two to three days of that, we went to lockdown”. He’s not alone in trawling the filmic imaginary to render a crisis intelligible when more quotidian vernaculars fail to furnish working heuristics. As in disasters of the past, before official or collective responses had congealed, the interruption of social, economic and political life was framed in the popular imagination by familiar stock narratives of scarcity (see Beaumont, 2014; Kierner, 2019). Thus, inchoate existential uncertainties gave way to culturally coded panic, with corresponding consumer tactics: people stocked up.

Ubiquitous toilet paper shortages were the tip of the iceberg. “We had run three counters there”, Girish told me of the panic buying that characterized the first few weeks of the initial lockdown. “All our counters were busy—like [with] three people working the counter, our lines extended back to the back door … Every counter, all the lines were to the back of the door. And it did seem like a scene from a movie. Like, people holding toilet paper, and pasta, and canned food, and chips and stuff … like this thing is really happening. People are doing it.” The spectacle of long lines and bare shelves itself became a trope rehearsed in the nightly news, a recursive semiotic (news-imitates-life-imitates-disaster-fiction) with which to make sense of the early days of the crisis. “As soon as the lockdown started”, Girish told me, “what you heard around the news, that was happening in our store. People were really clambering about toilet paper. After that, two to three days later, we started putting on the limits on our things. Like pasta—two packs of pasta and one toilet paper, per transaction”.

In these moments, the familiar forum of the supermarket became a cipher for the opaque alterity of the coronavirus pandemic (both the epidemiological phenomenon and the corresponding sociocultural, political and economic event). Evacuated shelves and panicked consumers became the imaginative landscape within which the crisis was worked through. In this chapter, I argue that supermarkets and grocery stores became a critical site of social reproduction, where anxieties about the virus and deeper political and economic tensions were rehearsed, regulated or resolved. The labour by which this was accomplished was surely “essential” labour but essential for deeper reasons than those typically highlighted in public discourse; it was deployed in the social reproduction of capitalist relationships of labour and consumption (Stevano et al., 2021; see also Bhattacharya, 2017).

Perhaps even more than other retailers, supermarkets trade in a sensorium of abundance, predictability and mundane domesticity. They represent a cornerstone of the household imaginary, the consumer oikos that is one of the fundamental social units that organize capitalist social relations (Cooper, 2019). Grocers and other food retailers therefore lean heavily on visual signifiers of bounty and affluence to encourage consumption; full shelves are prioritized to inspire consumer confidence and desire—even if much of that food goes unsold (Stuart, 2009, p. 27). In this way, they are a simulacrum of the surfeit of the consumer with the global market at their fingertips.

But for the same reason, they are haunted by hunger. The empty shelf repels customers (Stuart, 2009, p. 17), emanating a horror vacui that taps into latent awareness of the scarcity manufactured by capitalist value chains. Customers intuit that markets do not distribute resources efficiently according to need and that food and shelter are wasted in the face of food and housing insecurity (Springer, 2020). News media underscored this with images of food stocks destroyed by farmers and wholesalers during the pandemic due to labour shortages and interrupted supply chains—juxtaposed with long lines at foodbanks and welfare offices (see Dickinson, this volume). Although Australian authorities suggested otherwise, from a certain perspective, it was entirely rational to hoard food, toilet paper and other goods.

At the outset of the earliest lockdowns, this incipient consumer panic became a self-fulfilling prospect. Stocks that usually would have lasted for two to three weeks lasted for two to three days. “As soon as the lockdown hit”, Girish told me, “we were out of everything”. The pandemic instantly revealed both the vulnerability and the obscurity of our supply chains.

In this context, the pandemic supermarket served a more specific function than the mere satisfaction of sustenance—which, after all, has been accomplished in myriad ways during moments of both acute and long-term capitalist crisis, from May 1968’s rural–urban cooperatives to the ever-growing foodbanks of the contemporary charitable sector, or indeed grassroots mutual aid networks serving, especially vulnerable individuals under lockdown. In contrast, the pandemic supermarket maintained the logic of capitalist production and distribution. The job of grocery clerks like Girish, therefore—from the performance of reassurance and normalcy to the enforcement of social distance—worked with and within the economic and social shocks of the pandemic to recuperate them under the organizing principles of a consumer oikos.

The Paradigmatic Commodity Context

The supermarket is one of the quintessential mechanisms by which the commodity form is normalized and sustained with respect to the food system. Supermarkets and grocery stores, perhaps more than any other retailer, represent the archetypal endpoint of the value chain for our commercial food systems—the interface between customer and commodity, where its value is worked through. They instantiate a paradigmatic “commodity context”, as Arjun Appadurai might have called it (1986), wherein the product is apprehended qua product and its value realized. They therefore reinscribe the food commodity as a fetish—obscuring the conditions of its production and distribution that confer value upon it (Dixon et al., 2014). Yet in this way, supermarkets also represent a cipher for the entire chain (see also Giles, 2016, 2021). They are its fundamental horizon and compass point.

As Wolfgang Fritz Haug (1986) reminds us, no commodity’s value is ever certain. He builds on Marx’s insight that capitalist value is a kind of “social hieroglyphic” (2000 [1865], p. 475), a subjective expression of the social relationships of production, distribution and consumption that propel commodities into circulation. As such, that value remains fungible and unrealized right up until the point of sale, where it performs its “salto mortale” (Haug, 1986, p. 23), the death-defying leap from virtual to concrete. This leap cannot occur in a vacuum, of course. Haug suggests that its trajectory is defined by contexts and pathways of commodity aesthetics—such as those created by retail environments. In other words, its value is reckoned at each turn through affective and aesthetic judgements, in a cultural context where those judgements are rendered sensible (in both senses of the word). His insight helps us to begin to think about what kind of place a supermarket is.

Haug was writing in the 1970s, at an inflexion point, when the variety and volume of supermarket offerings was beginning to grow remarkably in industrialized nations (Goldfrank, 2005), corresponding to growth in both consumer and commercial food waste (Rathje & Murphy, 1992; Stuart, 2009). In many ways, the subsequent decades have been a period in which the commodity’s value has been increasingly driven by such affective determinations, although not limited to aesthetics narrowly understood. The post-Fordist era, as theorists like Antonio Negri (1992) and Maurizio Lazzarato (2006) have argued, has been one defined not solely or even primarily by the industrial labour of producing goods per se but by the “immaterial labour” (or “biopolitical production”, if you prefer their alternative formulation) of remaking social relationships of all kinds, all in the service of remaking our relationship to goods themselves. Indeed, according to Lazzarato, the postmodern commodity is an object primarily defined by information and affect. We can understand the supermarket, then, as a site of immaterial labour and biopolitical production par excellence, both congealing, rendering and making legible otherwise obscure supply chains and entangling our household rhythms with the commodity form, normalizing its part in our very sustenance. In other words, it is not the labour of producing that material use value that will be bought and sold for a price but rather the labour reproducing the mechanism by which exchange values (specifically) and exchange value (in general) are realized.

And in the face of crisis—or indeed, crises, as the pandemic revealed and provoked countless underlying contradictions and instabilities, both specifically in the food system and in late capitalism at large—as a commodity context, cipher and horizon for late-capitalist food chains, the supermarket and its immaterial, affective labours also served to restabilize the food commodity form in the face of pandemic shocks to the system.

In this context, the pandemic threatened the fates of business owners, grocery workers and commodities themselves with parallel forms of abandonment or abjection, as food lingered overlong on the shelves, employees lived in increasing uncertainty regarding visas and employment pathways, and owners hung anxiously on the sparse traffic of shoppers that kept them from going under. In their everyday biopolitical labours, these stakeholders instantiated such entangled urban circuits of value and looming dereliction. Their innovations, improvisations and expressions of solidarity were made both possible and necessary in the anticipation of a “return to normal”. Those adaptations and normalizations—by which some novel version of business-as-usual was established—are the stuff of immaterial and affective labour. Such labour was essential to the maintenance of the supermarket as an ongoing matrix for the realization of the food commodity form.

Obscure Supply Chains and Inscrutable Demand

Obscure supply chains and inscrutable demand characterized much of the pandemic for my interlocutors at the supermarket. By definition, of course, the introduction of a pathogen that avails itself of human connectivity disrupts relationships across the social fabric, including those relationships of production, distribution and consumption for which the supermarket is a translation matrix. In the process, however, the pandemic revealed how opaque or ineffable those relationships had often been.

For example, while the initial avalanche of sales was the most spectacular, headline-grabbing consequence of the pandemic for the grocery retailers, the more enduring implication—at least for the store in question—was the attrition of sales afterwards. Within a week or two of panic buying, demand dried up. Under Victoria’s stage-four restrictions, the store saw up to a 60 per cent drop in receipts. Even months after the end of Melbourne’s longest, 112-day lockdown, and a putative return to “normal” during the city’s relatively long period of relaxed restrictions in early 2021, with fewer people working in CBD offices and fewer attractions to draw them back, sales had fallen far short of pre-pandemic rates. “Our bosses thought that demand would be high”, said another clerk, Thapa, describing initial attempts to stock the store, “but they were wrong”.

Of course, the experience of distinct kinds of supermarkets in different locales varied widely, with some noting reduced patronage as customers avoided leaving the house (Castelló & Casasnovas, 2020), while others (especially those offering delivery services) recorded greater sales as customers stayed and ate at home (Stewart & Stewart, 2020; Troy, 2021). However, the unevenness of the transformation of commercial food chains is precisely part of the point. Even under relaxed restrictions and a partial “return to normal”, for the CBD supermarket in question, demand remained less predictable—not only in scale but in kind. As Naresh, who has worked there for three years, explained to me, they had to check the shelves more regularly to see what had and hadn’t sold in a given period. Product waste was less predictable and more common as a result, employees told me.

Indeed, as widely reported elsewhere, each of the employees I spoke with told me waste was a fundamental feature of the pandemic disruptions at my local supermarket. Products typically never thrown away before, like soft drinks and chocolate bars, were wasted in great quantities early in Victoria’s first lockdowns. The same pattern of waste was repeated, to a lesser degree, at the outset of the city’s subsequent “snap” lockdowns. Some unsold items were retrieved and replaced by suppliers—a common element of the commercial compact between wholesaler and retailer. And much of the excess was donated to food recovery charities such as Second Bite, who fed people who might otherwise have been buying groceries from supermarkets before the crisis. Indeed, in this respect, the pandemic consolidated a growing trend towards the joint enclaving of both commercial food surpluses and economically surplus, or precarious, communities in marginal disciplinary spaces like food pantries—a joint distribution of wealth and waste (Giles, 2016). Additionally, some of the excesses went home with supermarket employees (some small compensation for their diminished hours). And a great deal of food was placed in the bin. Fresh produce was the major thing that needed to be thrown away, Naresh told me. And indeed, throughout the lockdown, the neglected, wilted and overripe produce I found on the store’s shelves remain one of the most emblematic signifiers of the breakdown of market norms—a far cry from the aesthetics of abundance that characterized the typical pre-pandemic supermarket.

With stock that would previously have lasted a matter of days now sitting on the shelves for weeks, deliveries from the supermarket’s parent company—also its primary supplier—were ratcheted down from every week to every three weeks. And while that supplier still delivers 90 per cent of the store’s stock, according to Thapa, its supply chains were nonetheless disrupted in a range of ways. Thapa remembered, for example, the strange experience of trying to restock toilet paper following the initial panic and being delivered only a single pallet—much less than ordered. Throughout the first year of lockdown, there were other shortages of various products for reasons similarly inscrutable from the vantage point of the aisles—blueberries, raspberries or limes, for instance (the latter of which briefly tripled in price).

Maybe most telling was the long, anxious process of sourcing new stock when the existing suppliers failed. Girish told me about days on which his boss was up until two in the morning looking for new sources from which to order product. One of the owners himself told me that he’d been forced to devote time and effort to liaising in new ways with other retailers and restaurants across the CBD. Despite its putative role as the holistic prism through which value chains are refracted, when the usual, familiar channels are disrupted, those value chains turn out to be profoundly opaque, hidden from even the buyers—those agents who are ostensibly best placed to engage with and evaluate them.

This obscurity was captured perfectly—and not without some cheek—by Thapa, who told me about a conspiracy theory that had circulated among some of his friends to account for the toilet paper shortages. Since China produces a great deal of the country’s toilet paper, they reasoned, Chinese authorities must be deliberately throttling down the world’s supply for their own nefarious reasons. It’s telling that this was a more concrete account of the supply chain than any other Thapa had at hand.

Essential Labour

In spite of these disjunctures, what struck me most about the day-to-day operations of the store was, simply, that they went on. The experience employees described was of arriving at a new normal, however temporary. This ersatz normality not only assimilated new biopolitical regulatory apparatuses, both directly (as when health agencies visited the store to ensure compliance) and indirectly (as when some customers began to object to employees touching their food), but also recalibrated and rearticulated new forms of market sociality, in order to allow the supermarket to continue to perform its primary function as the horizon of commercial food chains in pandemic flux.

If, as I have argued above, the supermarket is a site par excellence of immaterial, affective production—whose chief “product” is the hegemony of, and our own routinized relationship to, the edible commodity form—then the work of incorporating the pandemic into that relationship is an “essential” form of labour. Indeed, pandemic transformations of the food system also bolstered alternative forms of food distribution, yielding new markets for retail delivery models such as Amazon Fresh (Stewart & Stewart, 2020; Hobbs, 2020) and new grassroots mutual aid networks, deploying non-market care packages of food and other necessities (Sitrin & Sembrar, 2020). The pandemic therefore threw into relief the everyday affective and “phatic labour” (Elyachar, 2010) that reproduces the cultural-economic context of the supermarket (see also Tolich, 1993). What was most essential was its role in working through the pandemic within the commodity context of the supermarket and vice versa.

It is telling, for example, that—whereas I was perhaps expecting to encounter stories of exploitative hours or unpaid overtime under pandemic duress, along with hostility and disrespect from anxious customers, along with racist overtones, considering that the grocery workers I spoke with were all South Asian—what I heard were stories of gratitude and solidarity in the face of adversity. Employees spoke with deep relief of the owners’ refusal to sack any staff, even those to whom “JobKeeper”, the federal wage subsidy instituted during the first year of the pandemic, wasn’t available due to their temporary-visa status (although hours were inevitably reduced as a result). And staff told me happily of customers’ consistent, dutiful, respectful observance of new regulations such as social distancing and the wearing of face masks. The production of this convivial setting (however constrained by the mood of life under lockdown) was a crucial component of their work.

This essential labour is also skilled labour. Consider the work of commodity aesthetics for which each of the employees was responsible; in the face of sparse and sedentary shelf stock, the staff did what they could to approximate the sensory environment of the paradigmatic supermarket, rearranging goods to minimize bare shelves and reminding customers of their desirous relationship to the commodity. Further, considering the inescapable amount of waste described above, staff were obliged to do what I have elsewhere called the “work of waste-making”—the subjective valorization and devalorization of shelf stock that consigns some items to the bin in order to lend more currency to the remaining goods (Giles, 2021).

And in addition to being skilled, the work of reproducing the pandemic supermarket is precarious labour—often done for relatively low wages by people who are under pressure or vulnerable as a result of their status. Most staff were students on temporary visas. They are highly educated and correspondingly highly skilled, but only entitled to work a limited number of hours, not entitled to the JobKeeper wage subsidy, and living in ongoing uncertainty about their status and future in Australia.

The pressures were myriad. One colleague had returned to India permanently because he found life under these conditions unsustainable. Others anxiously searched for full-time employment, as their visa requirements had apparently recently changed. Others were separated from family, including a new child born in India after the borders closed. Others were forced to seek support from the Red Cross. These, too, are the costs of reproducing the pandemic supermarket—the material externalities of “immaterial” labour.

Indeed, some of my interlocutors were precisely the people Prime Minister Scott Morrison had expressly told to leave at the outset of the pandemic—and the point was not lost on them. As Naresh told me, “Australia has got a bad reputation from the time of COVID, how they have managed international students here. And obviously, the word of mouth spreads so fast … Because Scott Morrison said to just go home. You know, that has a direct impact on how people treat temporary residents here. You know what I mean? If a leader says, ‘We’re all in this together so we should be together’, that would have changed the perspective of how we go about it”. Naresh hastened to add that, in spite of being frontline workers, they were not afforded priority access to the vaccine in the way that healthcare and aged care workers were. To people like Morrison, Naresh is at the end of the food chain in more ways than one.

Conclusion

Capitalist food chains were, paradoxically, both unsettled and entrenched by COVID-19. And nowhere were pandemic foodways more simultaneously exceptional and quotidian than at the supermarket. Grocery stores represented a critical site of social reproduction, where the political-economic conditions and contradictions revealed by the crisis were worked through, reconciled or normalized—or at least bracketed and neutralized.

If supermarkets and grocery stores represent the archetypal endpoint of the value chain for commercial food systems—the interface between customer and commodity, where the commodity’s value is realized—the social reproduction of this cultural logic in the face of unsettled circuits of production and consumption is essential labour. But it is essential for deeper reasons than those highlighted in public discourse about this emerging category of work. The efforts of employees and owners in a single independent grocery store in the Melbourne CBD over 18 months of lockdown, recession, and personal and economic uncertainty represent in microcosm the affective and phatic functions of this essential labour. They throw into relief the supermarket’s role as a definitive node that articulates the supply chains, consumer publics and regimes of precarious migrant labour that constitute the urban food system as a domain for the expropriation, circulation and accumulation of surplus value. Their innovations, improvisations and expressions of solidarity were both possible and necessary in the anticipation of an imagined return to “business as usual”. In the process, they renegotiated and remapped the unsettled landscape of urban food chains and maintained the integrity of the commodity context upon which so many of us relied to sustain ourselves.