I keep it around for its brain-soothing properties. There is something oddly relaxing about a banal item inexplicably shrunken into a fetish object. Sometimes I unfurl a tiny paper grocery bag and place the tiny pepper bottle inside, next to a tiny tin of Spam, a tiny jar of Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter and a tiny tube of Gourmet Garden Chunky Garlic Stir-In Paste.
Miniatures of all kinds have experienced a pandemic bump. As the virus rages outside, hobbyists can at least flex control of their own little worlds. Mini Brands service a nostalgia for the very recent past, when the grocery represented a familiar expanse; it was a place where, as Allen Ginsberg put it in “A Supermarket in California,” a person could go “shopping for images.” Now that same space feels anxious and claustrophobic, recast as a site of potential infection and a backdrop for violent confrontations between neighbors, captured by trembling cellphone videos.
Lately, I have been gravitating toward different kinds of images of Mini Brands. Not the collections carefully posed on Instagram, but the photographs posted alongside one-star reviews on Target.com. Published by frustrated and regretful buyers of the Mini Brands! Mini Mart set, they reveal scenes of devastation: mini plastic shelves hanging from their mini hinges; mini Cool Whip containers shoved into mini fridges; mini boxes of cereal and Boursin cheese strewn across mini tile floors. These images excite me, not because they transport me back to the idealized grocery aisle, but because they inadvertently deconstruct it.
In the photographs, it looks as if the Mini Brands! Mini Mart has been ransacked and abandoned in the face of some unseen menace. The supermarket has fallen, and now the miniature version is toppling, too.
Source: Hess, A., Murawski, A., & Copeland, S. (2021, March 2). The soothing allure of mini brands. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/arts/mini-brands-supermarket-sweep.html?searchResultPosition=3
Analysis: The allure of miniatures, whether sets, toys, or otherwise, has always scratched an itch in the collective societal brain, and utilizing that to create something like a miniature plane has proven to be highly successful in the past. While a miniature plane wouldn’t be ideal as the end all solution, there is something to be said about the convenience and novelty of small scale things that are big in actuality.
