Banal Series # 11: Big Box Stores 3 a.m.

The customer walks, or pushes a cart over the glimmer of linoleum. The aisles of the cavernous store fold out before the night shopper in a linear series of grids. This huge, largely empty store is a blank canvas. The shopper: perhaps an artist of nocturnal consumerism.

A box store at night is a great bay at low tide. The receded waters reveal pallets piled with cardboard cases of cans, cartons, seasonal gimcracks – denoting summer, back to school, Halloween, and Christmas – allowing the night shopper to see the inner workings of retail, and contextualize him or her in time. Workers face shelves, and restock goods, cleaving into the pallets over the course of a shift. Another worker pushes a frightening floor cleaner, not unlike a Zamboni of ice rink fame, up and down the aisles, traversing the entire surface by the end of the night.

The box store at night becomes a homogenous space station – kept at room temperature, and illuminated in familiar unnatural lighting – removed from the harsh realities of sweltering humidity, or sub freezing temperatures outside the embrace of the automatic doors.

A cohort of bored teenagers or slightly inebriated twenty somethings cannot seem to resist the ironic pleasure in reeling around this prepackaged wonderland. A jokester of the group inevitably gravitates to a motorized cart; clumsily goosing the electric throttle, and with a simpering whine, the cart leads the group, like clutch of locusts, onward through the labyrinth.

These large twenty four hour stores are generally a calm contrast to the cacophony of daytime shopping.

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