Supermarkets are becoming the new social hubs

New Statesman

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Supermarkets are becoming the new social hubs

Every week at 10am, a long table at the back of a Morrisons café in the Essex estuary town of Maldon fills up. Pouring each other squash, shoppers catch up on the week – last night’s TV, politics, hospital scans – under the bleep of tills and clatter of trolleys. There are around a dozen regulars, from the 23-year-old cashier Joshua, who wears emerald nail varnish and a goth-black T-shirt, to the pink-pashmina-clad retiree Suzi, 71. This is a “c…