Context Is the Real Product

A few weeks ago, the first 24-hour Migros store in Switzerland opened in my town. It is a small supermarket without staff. You enter by scanning your Cumulus card or an app. Curious to see how it worked, I went there on the opening day.

Instead of finding people shopping, I found a crowd standing outside the entrance. Nobody could get in.

The reason was almost comical. The scanner had been installed in such a way that the morning sun shone directly onto it, making it almost impossible to read the cards. Apparently the system had been tested extensively—except under the rather ordinary condition that the sun shines during the day.

I later wrote a short comment about the incident. Not only because of the faulty scanner, but because something else struck me. Why build an elaborate access control system if anyone can simply walk in behind somebody who is leaving? On paper, the system looked sophisticated. In reality it could be bypassed with almost no effort.

A local newspaper later mentioned the incident as nothing more than a technical problem during the opening, and I assumed that was the end of the story.

A few days later I returned because I had forgotten to buy a bottle of cola. This time the scanner worked perfectly. What caught my attention instead was the number of people inside. The shop was full. Some of the shelves were already half empty, and what surprised me most was not what people were buying but who they were. Many were elegantly dressed. Couples wandered slowly through the aisles. Families looked around almost as though they were attending an exhibition rather than visiting a neighbourhood supermarket.

Standing there, I found myself wondering what these people were actually buying.

The obvious answer is simple enough. Milk. Bread. Cola. But the longer I watched, the less convincing that explanation became. The same cola can be bought in any supermarket during the day. The same loaf of bread. The same bottle of milk. Nothing about the products themselves had changed, yet somehow they had become more attractive.

Why?

Perhaps we misunderstand products altogether. We tend to think that we buy objects, but perhaps what we really buy is the context in which those objects appear.

A bottle of mineral water sitting on your kitchen table is hardly worth noticing. The very same bottle after a long mountain hike feels priceless. In a five-star hotel it suddenly appears luxurious. During a heatwave it becomes relief. Bought at three o'clock in the morning in a 24-hour supermarket, it tells yet another story. The water has not changed. Neither has the bottle. Only the circumstances have changed, yet those circumstances transform the entire experience.

Once you begin looking for this phenomenon, you notice it everywhere.

During the COVID pandemic, even crossing a nearby border suddenly felt like an adventure. Not because the neighbouring country had changed, but because the context had. Oil is simply another commodity in times of peace. During war it becomes a strategic resource. Again, the oil itself remains exactly the same. What changes is the world around it.

Perhaps this is one of the great misunderstandings of modern life. We often speak about products as though they possess value independently, as though their importance were somehow built into them. But no object ever appears to us in isolation. Everything enters our lives at a particular place, at a particular moment, under particular circumstances. Those circumstances quietly shape our perception long before we consciously evaluate the object itself.

A cola bought at three in the morning is not interesting because it tastes different. It is interesting because it is available at a time when it normally would not be. What feels special is not the drink but the possibility that accompanies it.

The more I stood there watching people move through the aisles, the more I began to suspect that the supermarket was selling far more than groceries. It was selling the idea that shopping no longer had to obey opening hours. It was selling convenience, autonomy and a subtle sense of freedom. The milk, the bread and the cola merely carried that promise.

Perhaps the same principle extends far beyond supermarkets. Maybe we consistently overestimate the importance of objects while underestimating the importance of situations. Instead of asking, What is this product worth?, perhaps the more revealing question is, Under what conditions does this product become meaningful?

Things rarely possess meaning on their own. Meaning emerges from the relationship between an object, a place, a moment and a human being. Change the relationship, and you change the object itself—not physically, but psychologically.

That is why the crowded supermarket stayed with me. When I walked in, I thought I was watching people buy groceries. Looking back, I think I was watching people buy something much less tangible.

They were buying a new possibility.