The Pandemic Supermarket

AbstractDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, this chapter argues, the supermarket became one of the most important sites in which the conditions and contradictions of capitalist food chains, laid bare by the crisis, were worked through, normalized and sustained. If supermarkets and grocery stores represent the archetypal endpoint of the value chain for commercial food systems—the interface between customer and commodity, where its value is realized—the social reproduction of this cultural logic in the face of unsettled circuits of production and consumption is indeed “essential” labour. But it is essential for deeper reasons than those highlighted in public discourse. This chapter describes the labours of employees and owners in a single independent grocery store in the Melbourne Central Business District over 18 months of lockdown, recession, and personal and economic uncertainty. It captures some of the innovations, improvisations and expressions of solidarity made both possible and necessary in the anticipation of an eventual return to “business as usual”. These experiences throw into relief the supermarket’s function 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.