Lost in Translation: Groceries
What your grocery shopping experiences reveal about you.
Grocery shopping is a mundane, everyday activity. But, the choices—the products you consume, the shops you choose, the rituals you commit to—of shoppers reveals much more than you’d think. Here are two grocery shopping experiences to follow!
Nguyen Bao Han Tran: Plans lost in translation.
I go grocery shopping with a list and a plan every time. I tell myself this is the trip where I’ll stay disciplined and save money.
That plan usually collapses the moment I walk through the door.
Before I even reach the aisles, I’m greeted by neatly stacked fruits and vegetables. Everything looks fresh, healthy and intentional. I immediately start thinking I should buy more of this. It feels responsible. It feels like progress. What I don’t realize or pretend not to is that I’ve already stopped following my list.
I don’t choose products only because I need them. I choose them because of what they represent. Buying healthy food makes me feel like I’m taking care of myself, even when it wasn’t part of the initial plan. Slowly, my basket fills with items meant for a version of me who meal-preps, eats perfectly, and never lets food rot in the fridge.
By the time I reach checkout, I’ve spent more than expected. When I get home, I realize I forgot the essentials: rice, oil, toothpaste—the things I actually went in for.
We often frame moments like this as personal failure. Bad budgeting. Weak self-control. But grocery stores are designed to push us toward emotional decisions. Layout, lightning, and placement all encourage us to spend first and reflect later.
I could avoid this by shopping online, and sometimes I consider it. But I still choose to walk the aisles, wanting to see the shelves for myself, knowing exactly how easily intention turns into impulse.
Grocery shopping has taught me that discipline isn’t always about effort. Sometimes it’s about recognizing when choice itself has already been shaped and how easily our plans get lost in translation.
Avneet Kaur: Groceries are an identity crisis.
Grocery shopping feels less like an errand and more like emotional exposure therapy. You walk in with a list and leave with existential dread, five unnecessary snacks, and zero memory of why you came in the first place. The lighting is too bright. The aisles are weirdly organised. The decision feels too permanent.
Why does choosing pasta feel like a personality test? Why does every cart squeak like it’s narrating your internal panic?
Grocery stores are somehow very psychological. The chocolate aisle attracts whilst the salad aisle distracts. One of them guarantees dopamine and comfort. The other one is the vow of discipline, self-control and the version of yourself that drinks green juice and gets up at 6 am. It is not only food but identity. Grocery shopping is not always convenient but it is a strategy especially when you live with PCOS or in a body that is conscious of what it eats. Sugar isn’t just sugar. Carbs aren’t just carbs. There are no consequences in vain and a cookie now seems a moral choice rather than a snack.
And yet, reason vanishes once entering the store.
I end up excessively buying all that I already possess. Every time, no exceptions. I had once gone home with two bottles of ketchup and found two more already sitting at home, filled to the brim. My fridge is a gallery of the doubles. Three mustards. Two soy sauces. Enough spices to start a business.
Despite that, I feel offline shopping will never be it.
It is somehow more real to actually be on the aisles, feel produce, look at what is on the aisles. It feels real, messy, and human. Back at home in India, the main source of groceries were not aisles stacked with brands, but grocery shopping was done on the streets. One doesn’t have to scroll for vegetables on the screen, they have to bargain the price to break even the price and gain free coriander on top of all they buy.
Here, it’s shopping carts instead of the street vendors; checking out machines instead of conversations with cashiers; loyalty points instead of community. Nothing is cozy and everything is efficient. Nothing feels relational. Nothing feels like home.
There is more to grocery shopping than food, there is culture, memory, and identity. It is about what you want when you are exhausted, what you spend money on when you are in a bad mood, what you escape when you are frightened and what you indulge in when you are struggling to become a better person than you are.
It’s not an errand. It’s a mirror.
And somehow, I will still forget the one thing I actually went there for.
