Focusing on tourism's influence on large-scale retail trade (GDO), this
article intersects resistance to mass tourism with criticism of the
consumer goods distribution system, whose harmful large-scale effects
are now widely known, including the disintegration of local retail, food
waste, the exploitation of precarious workers, and dependence on an
unfair and fragile globalized economy. In an international context where
bulimic tourist flows are even swallowing up store aisles, giving rise
to a grocery tourism based on the purchase of food at supermarkets (and
who cares?), it seems interesting to ask how the vagaries of mass
tourism impact the management of a large-scale retail outlet,
effectively influencing the real need of permanent residents to obtain
basic necessities. To attempt to answer this question, we therefore
decided to examine the case of the Famila Superstore in Piazza Marina,
in Palermo's historic center, which appears to exemplify the
socioeconomic interference with which tourism attacks threaten the
quality of daily life in commercialized cities and neighborhoods.
A strategic crossroads of the illegal city during the long decades of
postwar abandonment of the historic center, Piazza Marina has long since
become one of Palermo's tourism hubs. On its southwest side, near Salita
Partanna, a large supermarket remains open today, having for decades
welcomed the overflowing and diverse crowds of the historic center,
satisfying their diverse demand for goods. Following recent renovations
and expansions, the new Famila Superstore was unveiled last July as the
emblem of a retail revolution, aiming to become a food hall (sic!) whose
aesthetic is clearly inspired by the nearby monumental heritage.
Upon entering the supermarket, you immediately enter the fruit and
vegetable section, where, perched atop a mountain of peaches,
instructions for the proper and independent selection and weighing of
fresh produce are displayed-all written exclusively in English. An
adjacent counter displays ready-made or ready-to-assemble salads,
rigorously packaged in abundant plastic: the ideal solution for a quick
and light takeaway lunch, best enjoyed during a brief break from your
tour de force in the shade of the monumental Ficus tree in Villa
Garibaldi, the public park that occupies a large portion of the square.
Meanwhile, in a season when the sunny Sicilian countryside abounds with
fruits and vegetables for all tastes, the only variety of tomato
available (aside from the very expensive ones packaged in plastic and
polystyrene) pulsates a radioactive orange... and it comes from Belgium.
While it's impossible to provide precise figures here, walking through
the aisles, one gets the sense that prices have generally increased,
especially (and not surprisingly) in the alcoholic beverages section.
But the most striking change concerns the staff. Of the employees who
had long served at this store (and until the renovations, during which
they were forced to breathe in the dust for weeks), only a fortunate few
have kept their jobs: all the others have been transferred elsewhere,
replaced here by younger workers with a parodistically helpful attitude.
This environmental and human transformation is even reflected in the
customers encountered, where even here, among the aisles of a
supermarket in a still very socially diverse neighborhood, the Palermo
working class seems to have disappeared in favor of a noticeable
increase in the number of tourists.
Even the informal parking attendant who for many years helped customers
carry their shopping from the checkout to the free parking lot adjacent
to the old store has been warned not to perform his service. On the
other hand, parking in the internal parking lot is now free for up to
ninety minutes and only upon presentation of a receipt for at least
EUR10, otherwise it costs EUR10 (yes, ten) per hour. And at the same
time, if the trend wasn't already evident enough, a galley delivery
service called "Spesa in porto" (Shopping in the Port) has been launched
with great fanfare, specifically for refueling boats moored at the Cala
marina, a few hundred meters from the square.
The observations made thus far leave no room for idle hope. The ongoing
tourism epidemic in Palermo, founded on the experience of an exasperated
exoticism that encourages the spasmodic consumption of substandard food
and alcohol at ever-increasing prices, dizzyingly multiplies and
intensifies the extractive trajectories that hamper the lives of the
thousands of people who persist in living in or visiting the city's
historic center on a daily basis. Even purchasing basic necessities in
the largest of the last two supermarkets in Palermo's historic center
still means enduring the all-encompassing subjugation that identifies
the tourist as the privileged recipient of any service: a tourist who
clearly doesn't want to cook local, quality vegetables; who doesn't need
a car to stock up on the supplies needed to make it to the end of the
month; who must be exempted from queuing at the checkout alongside the
real city, that of the unemployed, the migrants, and those who struggle
every day to get the pasta down for dinner. This is the city that is
slowly disappearing and we want to defend: the city of those who no
longer even think about traveling, those who have already made their
most awaited and desperate journey, those who are forced to breathe the
miasma of the piles of garbage scattered along the alleys of our captivity.
Salvatore Laneri
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
article intersects resistance to mass tourism with criticism of the
consumer goods distribution system, whose harmful large-scale effects
are now widely known, including the disintegration of local retail, food
waste, the exploitation of precarious workers, and dependence on an
unfair and fragile globalized economy. In an international context where
bulimic tourist flows are even swallowing up store aisles, giving rise
to a grocery tourism based on the purchase of food at supermarkets (and
who cares?), it seems interesting to ask how the vagaries of mass
tourism impact the management of a large-scale retail outlet,
effectively influencing the real need of permanent residents to obtain
basic necessities. To attempt to answer this question, we therefore
decided to examine the case of the Famila Superstore in Piazza Marina,
in Palermo's historic center, which appears to exemplify the
socioeconomic interference with which tourism attacks threaten the
quality of daily life in commercialized cities and neighborhoods.
A strategic crossroads of the illegal city during the long decades of
postwar abandonment of the historic center, Piazza Marina has long since
become one of Palermo's tourism hubs. On its southwest side, near Salita
Partanna, a large supermarket remains open today, having for decades
welcomed the overflowing and diverse crowds of the historic center,
satisfying their diverse demand for goods. Following recent renovations
and expansions, the new Famila Superstore was unveiled last July as the
emblem of a retail revolution, aiming to become a food hall (sic!) whose
aesthetic is clearly inspired by the nearby monumental heritage.
Upon entering the supermarket, you immediately enter the fruit and
vegetable section, where, perched atop a mountain of peaches,
instructions for the proper and independent selection and weighing of
fresh produce are displayed-all written exclusively in English. An
adjacent counter displays ready-made or ready-to-assemble salads,
rigorously packaged in abundant plastic: the ideal solution for a quick
and light takeaway lunch, best enjoyed during a brief break from your
tour de force in the shade of the monumental Ficus tree in Villa
Garibaldi, the public park that occupies a large portion of the square.
Meanwhile, in a season when the sunny Sicilian countryside abounds with
fruits and vegetables for all tastes, the only variety of tomato
available (aside from the very expensive ones packaged in plastic and
polystyrene) pulsates a radioactive orange... and it comes from Belgium.
While it's impossible to provide precise figures here, walking through
the aisles, one gets the sense that prices have generally increased,
especially (and not surprisingly) in the alcoholic beverages section.
But the most striking change concerns the staff. Of the employees who
had long served at this store (and until the renovations, during which
they were forced to breathe in the dust for weeks), only a fortunate few
have kept their jobs: all the others have been transferred elsewhere,
replaced here by younger workers with a parodistically helpful attitude.
This environmental and human transformation is even reflected in the
customers encountered, where even here, among the aisles of a
supermarket in a still very socially diverse neighborhood, the Palermo
working class seems to have disappeared in favor of a noticeable
increase in the number of tourists.
Even the informal parking attendant who for many years helped customers
carry their shopping from the checkout to the free parking lot adjacent
to the old store has been warned not to perform his service. On the
other hand, parking in the internal parking lot is now free for up to
ninety minutes and only upon presentation of a receipt for at least
EUR10, otherwise it costs EUR10 (yes, ten) per hour. And at the same
time, if the trend wasn't already evident enough, a galley delivery
service called "Spesa in porto" (Shopping in the Port) has been launched
with great fanfare, specifically for refueling boats moored at the Cala
marina, a few hundred meters from the square.
The observations made thus far leave no room for idle hope. The ongoing
tourism epidemic in Palermo, founded on the experience of an exasperated
exoticism that encourages the spasmodic consumption of substandard food
and alcohol at ever-increasing prices, dizzyingly multiplies and
intensifies the extractive trajectories that hamper the lives of the
thousands of people who persist in living in or visiting the city's
historic center on a daily basis. Even purchasing basic necessities in
the largest of the last two supermarkets in Palermo's historic center
still means enduring the all-encompassing subjugation that identifies
the tourist as the privileged recipient of any service: a tourist who
clearly doesn't want to cook local, quality vegetables; who doesn't need
a car to stock up on the supplies needed to make it to the end of the
month; who must be exempted from queuing at the checkout alongside the
real city, that of the unemployed, the migrants, and those who struggle
every day to get the pasta down for dinner. This is the city that is
slowly disappearing and we want to defend: the city of those who no
longer even think about traveling, those who have already made their
most awaited and desperate journey, those who are forced to breathe the
miasma of the piles of garbage scattered along the alleys of our captivity.
Salvatore Laneri
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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