Week 2 Session: The Route

Milk is at the back. Bread is at the back. Everything you came for is at the back — and the forty metres between the door and the fridge aisle is not an accident, it is the store's whole argument

1 March 2027

Before the session#

Bring a shopping list of three items you actually need this week. Nothing else.

In the session#

We trace the store’s real floor plan against its printed one. The aisle order is a strategy in de Certeau’s sense — designed from above, indifferent to any one shopper — and your habitual route through it is a tactic, a way of using a space you did not design. The gap between the two is the whole discipline of retail geography: milk at the back is not poor planning, it is the plan.

Afterwards#

Keep the traced route. In week six you will need it again, once the argument has more evidence behind it.