In recent years, a new way of getting to know a country has begun to spread: not through the halls of a museum or a beach, but by wandering among the aisles of a supermarket.
Today it’s called Grocery Store Tourism and on TikTok it has become a real phenomenon, especially in Asia, where creators challenge themselves to survive for days by eating only products from 7-Eleven mini-markets: onigiri, instant ramen, packaged sandwiches, or snacks of every kind.
Behind the social trend, however, lies an intuition far from new: stepping into a local supermarket means capturing a nuance of the daily life of the people who actually live there, something that rarely a monument or a tourist itinerary can show. It’s curious, because doing groceries in one’s own country is almost always an affair to be hurried through as quickly as possible. Abroad, instead, it becomes a way to decode a place through its shelves, its snacks, its small daily details.
What Grocery Store Tourism Is
The term is new, but the practice isn’t: beyond visiting a monument, taking a swim, or walking a trail, you step into the supermarket or the neighborhood shop to observe the real life of the locals of the place. It isn’t merely a TikTok-born fad, where abundant videos celebrate Japanese konbini or 24-hour Asian chains, or a trend also labeled supermarket safari, but the symptom of a different way of traveling, more tuned to everyday life.
It is also a response to the疲疲疲疲疲疲疲疲 fatigue of postcard tourism: the same instagrammable spots, the same addresses that are hardly secret anymore, the same signage that makes many cities surprisingly similar to one another. The grocery store, on the other hand, has nothing to prove because it exists to serve those who live there, not to seduce visitors.
Behind its sliding doors lies something closer to the real tempo of a place. Shelves of hyper-specific snacks, regional beverages, and everyday products offer an authentic glimpse that even the finest restaurant cannot fully convey. You enter whenever you wish, you pick up something unfamiliar, and in the worst case you leave with a bag of strangely flavored chips you don’t enjoy. In the best case, you depart with a new understanding of the place.
What the Supermarket Shelves Tell
Just observing what ends up in carts reveals what people eat and which flavors are most loved by locals. The price of milk relative to bread, the variety of yogurts, the breadth of the frozen foods aisle: these small details together tell a lot, from eating habits to economic means. There is also the pleasure of engaging with a new place through something seemingly banal: a label written in an unfamiliar language, by itself enough to remind you that you’re somewhere else.
An entire section devoted to butter, as happens in France, or the dozens of KitKat flavors that you can only find in Japan, are the little details that increasingly catch the eye of travelers.
Some stores have already become fixtures on travel itineraries, to the point of appearing in guidebooks alongside museums and churches. The Japanese konbini, famous for hot onigiri available even at two o’clock in the morning, are now a travel experience in themselves. The Grande Épicerie in Paris is a showcase of French gastronomic excellence, Peck in Milan tells of Italian high-end tradition, Fortnum & Mason in London is a chapter in English commerce history, while Erewhon in Los Angeles stands as a symbol of the wellness culture and American culinary luxury.
The risk that this practice could also end up turning into a social-media-crafted experience always lingers around the corner. For now, though, on your next journey, don’t forget to include a local supermarket in your itinerary as well.
