Supermarket Shock

For years I've noticed a phenomenon that I think of as "supermarket shock." It occurs when I go to an American supermarket (usually soon after my arrival in the US on any trip): I get completely overwhelmed, feeling alternately numb and giddy. I can't bring myself to take in an entire aisle at once, and by the end of my visit am staring only at the cart in front of me.

I attributed this to a combination of jet lag, culture shock, and too many choices. No supermarket I've seen in the world can beat an American one for sheer number of products (though some of the big British ones come close). I waste 15 minutes in the cereal aisle, trying to decide on a breakfast cereal. How many varieties of granola does the world really need?

But, just this trip, I've realized something else: sensory overload is also a factor. An American supermarket contains thousands of different packages, each of them designed to scream: "Buy me! Buy me!" A tremendous amount of marketing money goes into packaging research, because, in the heavily competitive environment of a supermarket shelf, the best package wins by catching the attention long enough to make that all-important leap from shelf to shopping cart.

I am usually very alert to my surroundings, constantly scanning and absorbing everything I see. This is one of the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder, and some ADD researchers believe that this hyper-attention helped our hunting-and-gathering ancestors to survive. But the cornucopious modern supermarket is hell for a hunter-gatherer: when everything is designed to catch my attention, everything does! I don't know where to focus, so I'm pulled a dozen ways at once. Especially after I've just spent a week on a photography and visual thinking course in Rome, opening my senses in order to make great pictures. Argh!

The visual bombardment extends well beyond the supermarket. Every urban and suburban stretch of highway is lined with billboards and signs; some even have moving text or images. Given the high rate of diagnosis of ADD in America, has anyone thought about the threat to public safety posed by constantly distracting drivers from the road?

Every surface, from bus shelters to park benches, has become a place to put advertising. There were scenes in the film Minority Report that took this to its logical extreme: retinal scanning and massive databases of buying information make it possible for individually-targeted advertising to be displayed on any surface (or hologram) that the hero happens to be looking at. This was by far the scariest thing in the movie, because it could well happen.

England, too, is being overspread with advertising. So far, Italy is not nearly as bad; you can drive along stretches of highway and see nothing but scenery. How relaxing. America's vast wilderness areas need protection for this if no other reason: they're the only place in the country where you can escape from advertising.