It has been a preoccupation of mine in imagining the supermarket
as a locus for political assembly.
Clearly, it has already overtaken religious assembly.
In the UK the big brand Supermarkets like TESCO and SAINSBURY
are principle organisers of daily life. The ritualised
relationship between customer and supermarket have been carefully
constructed and maintained to a degree that compares to the construction of
religious faith.

Church and Supermarket have long been rivals for share of sunday morning
customer with the Church losing out considerably to the out-of-town
Supermarket.
The Church has conceded that Goods and God will be worshipped in the
appropriate modern temple.

Its a privatised relation between customer and supermarket with no mass
communion as such. The introduction of loyalty cards facilitates a simple
exchange - personal data for points. The indexical reference to individual
shopping habits means that customers are now assembled next to each other
on a database, highly categorised and searchable.

Since the BSE fiasco and wide criticism of the food industry, the UK public
is losing its faith in the Supermarket but dependency is entrenched.
The Supermarket is starting to emerge as a highly politicised force for social
engineering, particularly as the UK Government is now collaborating with
Supermarkets to analyse their loyalty card databases in tracking
Genetically Modified food consumption.
 'Information on GM foods would be made available "in a form that can be
analysed on a product by product basis at postcode level." Using health
databases the information would be used to find out whether eating GM foods
is linked to illness.' (Friends Of The Earth Jan 99)

The Clubcard project (http://www.irational.org/tm/clubcard)
raised the possibility of political incursions into the relationship with
the supermarket as defined by the loyalty card and accompanying database.
The next stage for the project lies in mobilising the integrated
database/internet/postal strategy to synthesise communications about GM
foods.

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