On my table is a detailed miniature shaker of flakes of crushed McCormick red pepper. The bottle is small enough to hold between your thumb and forefinger; it looks like it’s made to fit on an anthropomorphic hedgehog’s spice rack.
I keep it close by for its brain-calming properties. There is something strangely relaxing about a banal item inexplicably reduced to a fetish object. Sometimes I unfold a tiny paper bag and place the tiny pepper jar inside, beside a tiny can of Spam, a small jar of Skippy creamy peanut butter and a tiny tube of Gourmet Garden garlic paste.
There is no tiny food in any of these tiny packages. They are called Mini Brands and represent the brand released from the product. Zuru, the toy company that sells Mini Brands, has launched dozens of household miniatures since its debut in 2019, including small Tresemmé bottles, slices of Babybel cheese and antibacterial wipes. On Instagram, you can find Mini Brands clinging to the skillful paws of famous hamsters and chinchillas, and on TikTok, influencers like @minibrandsmom film themselves hunting for 2-inch treasures in big stores and opening the complex package with a hypnotic rhythm.
Although Mini-brands are nominally marketed to children, they itch the adults itch: for the lost pleasures of the supermarket experience. I discovered Mini Brands through the writer Emily Gould, who advised me that Mini Brands “has the comfort of everyday comfort from a trip to the old supermarket”, adding: “Which, you know, is gone”.
I had never thought of enjoying the feeling of walking without thinking through the aisles of the supermarket, reveling in the worldly variety of differentiated food brands. But suddenly, I’m in tune with what I was missing: I feel it in my little McCormick shaker, in the pre-pandemic supermarket images from “How To With John Wilson” and in the crazed vitality of the revived game show “Sweeping the supermarket. “
Miniatures of all types have experienced an increase in the pandemic. As the virus spreads outside, amateurs can at least loosen control over their small worlds. Mini Brands serves a nostalgia of the very recent past, when the grocery store represented a family extension; it was a place where, as Allen Ginsberg said in “A supermarket in California”, a person could go “buy pictures”. Now that same space looks anxious and claustrophobic, remodeled as a site of potential infection and a backdrop for violent clashes between neighbors, captured by shaky cell phone videos.
You can still go to the supermarket, but you can’t get lost there anymore. Instead, you can stock up on your own tiny supermarket by ordering 5 surprise Mini Brands! Surprise Ball ($ 6.99 on Target.com), then opening its linen plastic shell to reveal a random selection of branded miniatures. It is an inversion of those toy bubble gum machines parked at the end of the checkout lines; now, the groceries themselves are the prize. The incidental nature of a Mini Brands acquisition – you never know what you’re going to buy – imitates the old attraction of impulse shopping, where you step through the noisy automatic doors in search of toothpaste and leave, perplexed, with an armful of snacks that you may never consume.
If the Mini Brands shrink the experience of buying groceries in the palm of your hand, the “Sweep of the Supermarket” surpasses it, dramatizing the task as an orgiastic ritual. The last “Supermarket Sweep” reboot debuted on ABC in October (previous iterations aired in the 1960s, 1990s and early 2000s). It is filmed in a fake store built inside a 35,000 square foot hangar at Santa Monica Municipal Airport; in each episode, competitors tear it apart, carrying hundreds of pounds of hams wrapped in gold, liquid laundry detergent and giant cans of Green Giant corn in their carts.
Mini Brands suggest that the iconography of the grocery store contains hidden treasures. “Supermarket Sweep” makes this explicit. As in “The Price is Right”, arcane knowledge of consumer culture is met with extraordinary rewards: Competitors who can instantly remember the brand of snacks that almost rhymes with “mojitos” (Doritos) or the accessory used by the Energizer Bunny (flip-flops) can earn tens of thousands of dollars.
At first glance, the new “Supermarket Sweep” represents a narrative triumph over Covid-19. Unmasked competitors fly joyfully down the aisles, and the show’s master of ceremonies, Leslie Jones, transforms into a virtuous performance like the rare American thrilled to work inside a grocery store.
But there is something strange about its shiny, high-definition appearance. Revisiting old episodes from the 90’s version, which were made available on Netflix last summer, reveal the texture that was missing: a studio audience waving bottles of Mountain Dew and Snuggle fabric softener in the air; competitors huddled in the agricultural products section, standing on the shoulder posts; the presenter – former soap opera actor David Ruprecht, dressed as a young pastor – embracing the winners as the credits roll. The vast, antiseptic and frighteningly silent presentation of the new version emphasizes only what is a controlled simulation in a studio. Watching the contestants frantically put food in their carts, they start to look like stockpiles for the pandemic that is approaching outside.
The disastrous romance, as Hillary Kelly recently pointed out in The New Yorker, often portrays these desperate purchases. In these narratives, the supermarket stands out as a monument to consumer culture. His breadth of offerings (or lack thereof) acts as a class marker, and with his stable food on the shelf, off-season mature products and useless packaging, he arrogantly asserts control over the natural world while accelerating its decline.
In “White Noise”, Don DeLillo’s 1985 apocalyptic novel, the gleaming grocery store is framed as a symbol of illusion, covering up signs of social and ecological collapse: “Everything was fine, would continue well, eventually it would be even better as long as the supermarket don’t slip. ”And in Rumaan Alam’s“ Leave the World Behind, ”published last year, a yuppie trip to a Hamptons market – where she spends hundreds of dollars on organic hot dogs, a“ jar of pickles made locally, “$ 12 maple syrup and” three liters of beer from Ben & Jerry’s politically virtuous ice cream “- is his final act of gay privilege before a mysterious disaster destroys his life.
The cultural fall of the grocery store – from consumer paradise to a paranoid contagion center – is captured in real time in “How To With John Wilson”, the HBO jewelry box from a show built around the documentary Wilson New York City . In one of the first episodes, Wilson goes to the supermarket, where he meets a man whose mind is filled with false memories of the items on the shelves. (He recalls, for example, that the smiling sun in the Raisin Bran box wore dark glasses.) The man belongs to a collective dedicated to suggesting conspiratorial explanations for this phenomenon – aliens, perhaps, or alternative universes – but the easiest answer is that the grocery store’s senseless iconography has taken root so deeply in the American mind that even the products themselves seem less real than our imagined versions.
Later in the series, Wilson returns to a market, only to find a seemingly endless line of shoppers meandering down the aisles, carts full of provisions as the virus invades the city. This was, in retrospect, a mistake – unmasked crowds wandering around the house for hours – but it shows the supermarket’s irresistible attraction as a psychic shelter, even when in fact it is a threat.
Lately, I have been attracting different types of images from Mini Brands. Not the carefully placed collections on Instagram, but the photos posted alongside a star’s comments on Target.com. Published by frustrated and repentant buyers from Mini Brands! In the Mini Mart set, they reveal scenes of devastation: mini plastic shelves hanging from their mini hinges; mini Cool Whip containers tucked in mini refrigerators; mini boxes of cereal and Boursin cheese spread over the mini tile floor. These images move me, not because they transport me back to the idealized aisle of the grocery store, but because they inadvertently deconstruct it.
In the photos, it looks like the Mini Brands! Mini Mart was looted and abandoned in the face of some invisible threat. The supermarket has fallen and now the miniature version is also falling.