Overview
Explores the bleach-scented, dizzyingly over-lit world of a supermarket’s aisles, as austerity makes everyone within the store’s walls poorer.
Have you felt the daily thumbscrew of restacking shelves in a supermarket? Have you ever lost yourself in the aisles?
Set during 2013 and 2014, in those halcyon days when austerity was really gaining momentum, the novel interweaves the lives of downtrodden supermarket workers with political, social, and architectural histories of the time, reminding us of the habits and trappings of consumerism at the beginning of the last decade, all under the glaring, antiseptic lights of Tesco’s flagship superstore.
The protagonist, a young man who has moved to London to pursue a passion for studying literature, must take up work at this store to support himself, and must sofa surf until he can afford a room of his own somewhere in the city. While he moves from sofa to sofa, while he works at the store, and while he struggles to find the time to write and read, he experiences perhaps the biggest horror of capitalist excess: Waste. After every shift he is instructed to throw all of the unsold salads and pastas and olives and fruit into enormous industrial skips hidden in the supermarket warehouse. This soon becomes a daily assault on his conscience, and on the ecology of the landfill to which the waste is subsequently sent.
And throughout all of this, he remains nameless, never receiving a nametag of his own, so is forced to wear the names of ex-employees. He gradually comes to embody them all, losing himself again and again along the aisles.
Have you felt the daily thumbscrew of restacking shelves in a supermarket? Have you ever lost yourself in the aisles?
Set during 2013 and 2014, in those halcyon days when austerity was really gaining momentum, the novel interweaves the lives of downtrodden supermarket workers with political, social, and architectural histories of the time, reminding us of the habits and trappings of consumerism at the beginning of the last decade, all under the glaring, antiseptic lights of Tesco’s flagship superstore.
The protagonist, a young man who has moved to London to pursue a passion for studying literature, must take up work at this store to support himself, and must sofa surf until he can afford a room of his own somewhere in the city. While he moves from sofa to sofa, while he works at the store, and while he struggles to find the time to write and read, he experiences perhaps the biggest horror of capitalist excess: Waste. After every shift he is instructed to throw all of the unsold salads and pastas and olives and fruit into enormous industrial skips hidden in the supermarket warehouse. This soon becomes a daily assault on his conscience, and on the ecology of the landfill to which the waste is subsequently sent.
And throughout all of this, he remains nameless, never receiving a nametag of his own, so is forced to wear the names of ex-employees. He gradually comes to embody them all, losing himself again and again along the aisles.
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