london belongs to me

LIDL's uk outlets are part car-boot sale, part eastern-bloc theme park, part 70s simstim. It's an extraordinary place that goes against every rule of the cutting-edge supermarket. You know how in Goodbye Lenin; Alexander has to go out and get the old east-german pickles for his mum and finds the supermarket transformed into a cornucopia of glossy overpackaged goods from all over the planet? Going to LIDL is like that, in reverse. Other chains can be pleasingly parochial (at the Somerfield I went to in London there was a small section of an aisle signposted as 'foreign foods' - including that rare exotic creature, pasta). But LIDL tops them all for making no effort. Semiologically, it's neither hot nor cool, it's colder than Iceland, it's where lifestyles go to die. If you're still looking for those pickles, Alex, I can pick some up for you tomorrow.

A modest rather than gargantuan number of aisles, with gaps you can see through so that you don't have that sense of being serially imprisoned and subjected to the total transcendent power of each product category. Few shelves, instead there are just huge piles of staple goods; and all in packaging which presumes only to say 'this is a pot of fairly OK jam' or 'this is normal coffee'. Now in cutting-edge establishments, with their combinatorial grid that makes sure there is at least one choice of each product for each lifestyle group, even cheap no-brand goods have a carefully-designed non-branded look and feel (eg Tesco's value). They spend money on packaging which screams cheap-and-generic. This is not as perverse as it seems, given that these products, for the purposes of the retailer, exist only in the semiotic realm - so they can't truly be generic.

But in LIDL we are truly at brand degree zero. Everything is branded with innocuous names whose old-world hyperbole now seems like quaint understatement: 'royal', 'supreme', 'maverick'. This is less; than no-name brand. There's no intended referentiality, no aspirationalism or anti-aspirationalism, no dot-com crypticism, not even any attempt to appeal to your being a cheapskate. Everything's just vaguely foreign, vaguely old-looking, and truly generic. There may be kitsch-appeal, but it's not there on purpose (which I suppose makes it that truly rare thing, authentic kitsch).

Shuffling around (in LIDL everyone shuffles) in the post-nuclear silence is like a form of therapy. Unlike other supermarkets, you're not fatigued by the mental popcorn-pan of meticulously-placed psychological triggers sparking up every time you turn your head. You're not surrounded by a combinatorial cacophony of possible lifestyle elements, assemblable into a million lives all better than yours. You actually don't feel compelled to buy anything you didn't come in for. None of this modest down-at-heel stuff even looks appetising! The shelf labels are bits of white cardboard with prices so unfashionably depicted that like a backward grocers they boldly declare themselves, in totally passé fonts - starkly 52p, 64p, where a smoother operator would have decimal places straight from the supply-logistics software, not to mention a ream of supplementary data (price per KG, dietary information, packaging information, information for stupid hypochondriacs with imaginary allergies). There are so few lifestyle cues here, you feel you're in a mausoleum. After the semiopocalypse reigning over the rest of the retail world, it's a truly uncanny experience to be here where not every single aspect of the environment has been carefully planned.

At LIDL the compulsion to buy, where it exists at all, is driven by cheapness. And for that reason the whole shop has the feel of one of those stalls at car boot sales where inexplicably along with their cracked teapots and 70s Top of the Pops albums, a family have 20 crates of out-of-date wotsits and panda pops on sale. Commodity-for-commodity, things are literally a half or less of the price they would be anywhere else; you can actually start adding up the surplus cost of the signs you usually consume.

Adding to the carboot ambience, there's the mystery aisle. In a surreal poor-man's analog of the large supermarket chains' constant expansion into every retail market there is, LIDL has a couple of wire baskets with incongrous items piled into it, one day it'll be wellington boots, the next fax machines. And there's only 3 or 5 or 7 of them, after that they're gone, never to be seen again. It takes a stretch of the imagination to believe that this place is run by a multinational rather than a market trader from Peckham.

Without all these techniques for making you buy shit you don't want, and even with the obvious marketing cost-savings, how do they make money? LIDL seem to have revived, in the midst of post-postmodern lifestyle culture, an archaic stage of capitalism. Where the cutting edge moves on, it leaves gaps in the market which still have profit potential.

This is no aesthetes boutique, LIDL caters mainly to people who want to pay 70s prices. One of its secondary audiences is europhile ex-ex-pats since it carries an immense amount of brands and products that you would expect to find in a euroland hypermarket. Here's what I see as LIDLs customer base - tens of thousands of people in the country who, for one reason or another, as far as marketing is concerned still live 'in the past'. I'm not talking about ardent campaigners for the overthrow of global capitalism, but about people to whom participation in the dominant yoof culture appears irrelevant, incomprehensible, or for some other reason not worth paying good money for. As an aside, you can find here many of the euro-trendy products that Tesco would market to death as speciality fetishes, but at the price european people would actually pay for them. Showing (if it needed to be shown) that people would rather buy the sign of authenticity even when actual authenticity is available. Rather than buying the same coffee a parisian would buy, they need the coffee to have a picture of someone acting conspicuously parisian on the front. Hey, actual authenticity is cheaper, but it would betray a lamentable faith in the power of truth for someone to live by this LIDL principle, just imagine what your friends would say!

Speaking of euroland, it's strange that whereas in europe, in fact in most places in the world, LIDL would not stand out at all. Why is it in Britain we are subject to the most intense semiosaturation? Even in the states K-marts and their ilk abound, and somehow marketing doesn't seem to exert the constant, intense grating pressure that it does here. It's an essential part of Blair's phoney 'young' britain, with its emphasis on our 'creative industries', this compulsion consumers have to keep up with every tiny twist and turn of branding-production.

Perhaps there is some reason for paying attention to truly 'innovative' marketing ideas (but of course the shock of the new lasts only days, if that). But for every one of those, there are a thousand 'creative industry' hacks trying and failing to capture other people's "edgy" bullshit. Spend a day in any "creative" company and see whether you don't come out swearing to commit homicide next time you hear the word "edgy". These people would be better off, and probably quite successful, designing a LIDL label that says 'this is normal jam', but they'd feel inadequate in front of their friends if they weren't striving for 'edginess' - after all, they're only designing jam labels until they get their own edgy digital creative consultancy set up.

How come in britain we live under the tyranny of the cutting edge? You only have to look at TV to see this is true. Don't you cringe thinking of all the OAPs sitting in front of their TVs watching an endless procession of blipvert idents, 2-minute-long edgy CGI-driven brand-boosting psuedo-ads, bumpers..... This is an extension of the essence of TV, which is essentially a monolithic medium - to talk about 'what's on' TV is always to miss the point, it's the physiological circuitry of TV-watching that is important. Likewise, no matter what number of shitty lifestyle-choice channels there are, the tyranny of cutting-edge compulsion-and-addiction semiological technologies is the real message.

Actually, those old geriatrics from another world, the fact is, they probably literally can't see; all that stuff (I seem to remember this is a k-punk riff), their brains are just not programmed from birth to pick up all those packed-in signals. Anyway, in a forward-moving, progressive, 'modern' (don't you cringe when Blair uses this word) society, it's horribly inappropriate to think from this point of view no doubt. The real question is, what is the effect of this shit on those who are; programmed to process it? The only way to get some perspective on this is to preserve the LIDLs of this world!

It's bizarre, this totalitarian effort - led by the BBC - to align every single member of the public, no matter what age, class, social background, to aspire after the same vacuous 'yoof' metrotrendy lives. Essence of Blairism. LIDL gives us an admittedly pathetic hope, it says the unsayable - that there is a market for non-semiologically-saturated goods (without recourse to saccharine village-green fantasies of 'proper shops'). Whereas soho's stormtroopers of unconscious-management may plunder the past to give us a semiologically-charged 21st century 'update' of everything 70s, 80s, and no doubt 90s, like a good air-freshener LIDL products fill the atmosphere around them with neutrality, and kick against the mediarati stench of the cutting-edge.

Of course this is all nostalgia already. No doubt, soon enough LIDL too will fall. The brand managers arrive, fatuous platitudes and core strategies, and LIDL is integrated into the planned semio-economy. Catch it while you can.

Nb.LIDL seems to be a german company. Maybe it's a really cool, with-it place to shop in germany. Hope I haven't offended anyone ;)