Docile consumers in “Regarde les lumières mon amour”

Annie Ernaux’s Regarde les lumières mon amour is a journal of her observations while shopping at an Auchan supermarket. At first, her observations seem deliberately mundane. Ernaux watches people walk through aisles, wait in checkout lines, buy clothes, food, and household products. Yet by paying attention to something that is usually ignored, she reveals the supermarket as a space where some of the most important social realities of contemporary society become visible: class, race, gender, consumerism, and globalization.