From the Dry Goods Store to the Megastore

A phenomenon happens on the weekends that never ceases to surprise me: families get all dressed up to go spend a day at the superstore. Shopping centers are becoming leisure centers and places to socialize. It’s true that these capitalist consumer giants bring everything you could ask for together, which gives a sense of happiness that most people can’t seem to get enough of: there are places to drop off the kids without having to worry about them, cafes, places to eat something (sorry, but I don’t think I can include burger chains in the ¨restaurant¨ category), cinemas and, of course, offers on products within our price range that are extremely tempting.

The seeming ease of these megacenters makes me reflect on the good that they provide, such as how they’re so convenient because you have everything you need under one roof and you don’t need to waste time going from place to place to get what you want.

Give me a break!

The great hidden danger, nestled between the perfectly organized shelves to direct our attention to the most interesting product, is “depersonalization”.The apparent abundance of products creates a subliminal message that manipulates victim-client-visitors to buy things that we probably don’t actually need but which tempt us from the shelves. Store brands, with their seemingly good value for money dazzle us and create serious problems for traditional products that don’t have any shelving room in these excessive establishments. And the music is selected to make us move to the rhythm of the seller: melodic and soft at less busy hours, hurried and frantic at rush hour.

I remember how on Saturday mornings the streets used to bustle with people, bags in hand, going to cafes to meet their friends, or bars to have some tapas before eating. I remember shops where the seller knew the buyer and advised you on the qualities and bad points of a particular product. There were book shops with booksellers like librarians, clothes shops with sales assistants that could have been clothing designers, old fashioned general stores (ultramarino in Spanish, a beautiful name that nobody ever remembers!) with  a man in a grey coat who would appear from behind bags of sugar cubes that smelt of the Caribbean and the Far East… and there were cinemas that played films in their original version and where you could see movies that didn’t necessarily come from Hollywood (which are very good, by the way, but not the only thing in the world).

Now multiscreen cinemas from entertainment multinationals take up the center of the shopping center where numerous films from television are played over and over (remember Big Brother from the George Orwell novel 1984).

When you get to your Spanish class and you have to introduce the vocabulary of shops to do an activity like “go shopping or go to the shop” it depresses me when I’m reminded that it’s no longer the bookseller that recommends you take a look at the more recent novel by a lesser-known writer, but that a person in a uniform sells you a book like you would be sold a bag of potatoes, bath curtains or a pair of shoes.   

There’s no space left for old-style ultramarino stores anymore, at least not in Spain. In the Americas there are fortunately still some of these older grocery stores still around, colmados or pulperías that keep the richness of variety alive and are confirmation that not everything is wrapped in plastic, perfectly labeled and homogenized like the rest of the world.

The wealth of Spanish comes from the diversity of its speakers (from its owners, because a language is owned by those who speak and create it) and its different cultural surroundings, diversity which, for me, is taken away when I go into the sterile, windowless place of fluorescent lights that is the superstore.