An appetite for blogging

For most of us, images of empty shelves and rationing are either the stuff of wartime films and TV documentaries or not-too-distant memories of an Eastern European shopping trip.

This weekend, I travelled back in time when popping up at my local Waitrose for top – up shopping. Usually, Saturday grocery shopping is not a pleasant experience, especially with an impatient 2-year old in the trolley.

But Waitrose was getting a refit and things being tight in retail, it had decided to stay open during the works, like most of shops these days.  This resulted in surreal scenes of hordes of home-counties mothers and toddlers looking at rows after rows of empty shelves. A solitary lettuce was sprinted at. Three pots of fresh soups were waiting for a date. And everywhere, stunned, lost looks, disorientated trolleys and contrite Waitrose partners explaining what was going on between loading in what was left in piles of black crates.

For me, it was a throwback of early 90s Prague and a familiar, if a little distant now, memory of same empty shelves and mono-brand shopping.

And what struck me was how liberating it was to have a reduced choice for the last piece of bread, never mind the format, shape and state (baguette was broken in three pieces as it happened).

The mind wandered on what it would look like if real word was an episode of Spooks, where some strange radiation or chemical attack wipe out the supply-chain and forces us to re-consider what we take for granted. The reality is that for many, of course, the luxury of choice doesn’t exist. And we know that their ranks are growing in synch with house repossessions.

Strangely, people were kind again and there was a happy communion of shrugged shoulders and corner smiles.

The other interesting outcome of this episode is that it underlines the key role that retailers plays today as editors of choice and my other contention that too much choice is not necessarily a good thing. Indeed, choice is not the same thing than freedom. Philosophers argue that we have no real choices, only limited ones – that’s partly because they are obsessed with the inevitability of death. But it also only takes a few empty shelves to remind us that choice is truly a relative thing.

Sometimes it takes small “events” to shift our value set and make us stop and think. Empty shelves have more good in them than first thought.