Supermarket sociology

I've been missing the Sheng Siong supermarket across the street from where we used to stay. It is always so lively there. That got me thinking about how different the clientele is at the various supermarkets in Singapore. If I taught sociology I would encourage a student to do a sociological study of customers and behavior at various stores. Here are some generalizations based on my experiences in a few neighborhoods.

There are many dimensions you could examine: language, accent, attire, purchases, queuing style, the list goes on. At our old Sheng Siong, for example, one rarely hears English. That branch, because of its location, attracts many mainland Chinese workers staying at dormitories in Geylang, as well as some Vietnamese women from Joo Chiat. You can hear plenty of PRC-accented Mandarin. Some of the clerks speak almost no English. The store is often so packed that moving around is difficult, and during holiday times the shop expands into the carpack. It's casual. The fruit stands are often pungent with the smell of jackfruit. And live frogs look up at you from inside their bucket.

One rung up in terms of price is the Fairprice chain. At the branch closest to our place, it felt like a luxury after Sheng Siong to walk down the wide, empty aisles. There the language changes to locally-accented English and locally-accented Chinese, as well as some dialects. Elderly Singaporean women staff the counters. The fruit stalls are odorless. But people don't buy fruit or vegetables here. Fairprice complements the system of wet markets. Fairprice is the supermarket of the heartlanders.

Then there is Cold Storage, home to arctic airconditioning and S$17 bags of potatoes (really!). The incidence of foreign-accented English (including among Singaporeans) rises sharply, to at least 30%. Staff tolerate white people being unnecessarily friendly. Customers push carts through the aisles, which they load up to take down to their vehicles, which they will drive back to their private homes. Some 20% of women wear sunglasses on their heads (okay, I haven't really counted). No buckets of frogs. 

And there we have it. Just by looking at supermarkets we have identified three classes of Singapore residents who differ in their cultural, linguistic, residential, and economic characteristics. All of this could be better established by sociology students going out and actually recording these things and putting real numbers on them. Visible traits could be correlated with housing types, status in Singapore, and income. But anyone who's stayed in Singapore already knows it's true.