The Ballad of the Big Asda

How a massive supermarket has played an unexpectedly large part in my pandemic

The big Asda wasn’t much part of my life before Covid, despite it being the nearest supermarket to me. I’m not a fan of huge supermarkets and shopping centres. The harsh lighting, the garish colours, the unbridled capitalism, always leaves me feeling faintly sad. And the big Asda was a particularly bad example, about as big as supermarkets get in this country, always making me thing of Monstro Mart in The Simpsons “where shopping is a baffling ordeal”.So, before the pandemic, we tended to get our shopping delivered instead.

Come the start of Covid though, as more people had to isolate, we felt that other people needed the delivery slots more than us, and they were increasingly hard to get in any case. We decided to tackle the world of supermarkets once again. The lockdown rules said to leave the house as little as possible, and to stay as local as possible, so a weekly shop at the big Asda it was.

Those first few weekly shops were incredibly bizarre. The queues led all the way down the massive car park and back up the other side, with people getting used to socially distancing (but not yet wearing masks, as they hadn’t been mandated). Panic buying had begun in the weeks preceding lockdown, so many goods were out of stock. It was unusual, in our society which generally caters to our every whim, to not know if we were going to be able to buy what we wanted.

It was hardly communist Russia, or capitalist Russia for that matter, but it was still deeply strange. I was no doubt overreacting, but I remember worrying at times whether I was going to be able to feed my family, which is certainly not something I’d ever had to think about before. I got genuinely upset one time when I placed a click and collect order, but turned up to find it hadn’t been prepared because their computer systems were overloaded. I always like to know where my next meal is coming from and tend to get unnaturally stressed if I do not.

Because of the queues, the one way systems, and social distancing, each trip to he big Asda was taking 3 hours in those early days, but I soon realised the trick was to go as early as possible in the morning, first 8am, then 7,then 6, as opening hours inched closer to the pre-pandemic 24 hour opening.

Side Note — when the first 24 hour supermarket opened near us in the mid 90s, one of my teenage friends turned up there at 3am, dressed in a rabbit costume, and purchased a single carrot.

Anyhow, I got used to shuffling around that massive Asda at a ridiculously early hour, the bright lights and perky pop music seeming incongruous at that time of day. And believe me, even the most joyous song has a certain melancholy when you’re in Asda at 6am during a pandemic.

I began to recognise most of the staff, taking the opportunity to stock the shelves whilst the place was fairly empty, and some of the customers, even through our respective masks. As someone who grins like an idiot at almost everyone he passes by in an attempt to be friendly, I missed being able to give a smile of recognition greatly.

I began to almost enjoy my weekly visits. Well ‘enjoy’ is probably overstating things, but there was a certain comforting familiarity to it. A settled routine, which even extended to walking exactly the same route round the supermarket every time, due to the one way system (now the one way system has gone, I still follow the same route out of habit).

I would emerge from the big Asda at a still very early hour into an often dark morning, then arrive home usually just as my wife and kids were getting up, it felt good to be home, but still clear that all was not right in the world.

Time has moved on, restrictions have eased, and I have returned to something more like my old routine, (at least from a grocery shopping point of view — not in many other areas of my life). I don’t go in the big Asda very often very more, but I have a feeling that every time I do, for the rest of my life, I will be reminded of these Covid years. I have spent a lot of my time there during this pandemic, indeed for many months it was the only place outside my own property that I went. I’m not quite sure what this means, but it feels like it means something.