Britain's aisles of strangers

The last Morrisons café is closing its doors. Since April, the supermarket chain has been shutting down its 52 in-store cafés, ending with the Haxby branch in north Yorkshire on 14 May. Seeking a leaner model, the company is instead trialling new 'robots' to guide customers through the aisles and check stock levels, pricing and placement.
This isn't just a niche retail story. As high streets have withered and councils have cut municipal spaces, supermarkets play a significant role in people's social lives in Britain today. (Many superstores even resemble ersatz townhalls with clocktowers and steep gables – following what is known as the 'Essex Barn' architectural style, after planning officers ruled in the Seventies that an Asda in the Essex town of South Woodham Ferrers should mirror the county's heritage buildings.)
I have read 'place diaries' submitted by participants in a study by Cambridge University's Bennett Institute for Public Policy, which revealed people across the country recounting 'meaningful' experiences and 'first-name terms' conversations while food shopping. The academics behind this research highlighted the significance of what they labelled 'weak ties' or 'micro-interactions' to our well-being.
'There have been studies looking at the power of 'weak ties', say between a barista and a customer, or informal interactions between strangers on trains, for example,' the Bennett Institute's Rosa Marks told me. 'They've all shown to lead to better mental health and general happiness. There is a real power to these casual interactions that I think are often taken for granted.'
I saw this first-hand when I stationed myself at the 'Chatty Café' table at a Morrisons on a Wednesday morning in Maldon, Essex, last year. Over cups of milky tea and jugs of squash, cashiers in their twenties chatted with elderly pensioners, as parents of young children popped in and solitary shoppers nodded along to the conversation at nearby tables. The discussion spanned hospital scan results, food prices, grief, and last night's telly.
Morrisons CEO Rami Baitiéh has blamed the supermarket's cost-cutting measures on the government, which hiked national insurance and minimum wage, as well as introducing a packaging levy, last year. Whether or not this is fair criticism, politicians and government officials should pay more attention to what it really means to a community when supermarkets decide to downscale. Keir Starmer fears the prospect of an 'island of strangers'. In a Britain where a quarter of adults feel lonely, perhaps he should look at the aisles of strangers first.
[See also: How Labour learned to love immigration control]
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