A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #463 - Always and Only Serving Tourists: Tourism and Large-Scale Retail Trade (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

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/
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