I thought it would just be big news for me but I had reckoned without the TikTok generation, mums staring at the premixed cocktails and the yoga-mat brigade stalking every aisle
I’m a very staunch fan of the Marks & Spencer crisp combo mix, in every flavour (ready salted is the obvious exception, and the Christmas maple bacon is an acquired taste); the fact that some of the shapes are bad (the wheels) and some are magnificent (the shells) only adds to my admiration. It is random reinforcement, in crisp form. Consequently, when I saw an M&S was opening in Clapham Common, south London, I was pretty excited, but I thought it was just big news for me and maybe one or two other bar-snack connoisseurs.
I had reckoned without the TikTok generation, who have lost their minds over the new biscuits. I’d also overlooked the constituency of fancy people, who favour a shop that sells 17 different varieties of apple, and want to see everything in a fridge, even things that definitely don’t need refrigeration. I hadn’t given enough thought to the people who just like to go up to a wall of premixed cocktails and stare at it, but this turned out to be every single mum from the kids’ primary school, me included, so it was like a reunion. I don’t really associate M&S with health food, but the yoga-mat brigade stalked every aisle in pairs; it looked like Noah’s ark for people with very strong cores. This, my friend’s husband explained, is because middle-class people don’t worry about alcohol, or sugar, they only worry about palm oil and processing.
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