Ideologies and Sales Cultures: Lights and Spaces at the Supermarket

Abstract

This paper will investigate the role of lighting in the quintessential commercial place: the supermarket. In particular, it will seek to understand how light contributes to constructing a sense of place and defining the supermarket as text. Supermarket's system of illumination reveals the construction of a framed device that relates the fresh product and the canned products. According to a structuralist point of view, both conventional and organic supermarkets will be considered as the different treatment of light gives rise to two opposing ideologies of sales and consumption.