Slow Shopping initiatives in Sainsbury’s, The Cooperative and Tesco offer a more relaxed, assisted shopping experience at certain times – typically weekday afternoons – to make shopping easier for elderly shoppers and customers with mental-health needs, anxiety, dementia and autism. Sainsbury’s, for example, offers chairs at the end of aisles, help desks and shopping assistants, and The Cooperative and Tesco allow extra time for people to checkout. Slow Shopping empathises with people’s needs and tailors services accordingly. It also encourages staff to stop and chat with customers – to have interactions with them as people rather than just revenue streams. These seemingly minor changes allow customers for whom supermarkets are important social environments, but who have needs that hinder accessibility, to realise the social benefits of shopping whilst feeling welcomed, not pressured, for who they are. Although in a small way, this offers a more relational supermarket experience for those who desire it.

The Cooperative recently extended a free taxi service for customers with limited mobility or young children. A taxi home, free within five miles, is available to any customer who has spent at least £25 but faces barriers to carrying their shopping home. Like Slow Shopping – and again in a small way – this relates to customers as people with needs beyond locating baked beans and checking out.

The Tesco store in Maryhill, Glasgow, shows how a welcoming supermarket culture helps foster meaningful relationships and realise social benefits. It has attracted a lot of attention partly for this reason, and partly because similar relationship-centred efforts are scarce. Staff, customers and researchers agree that such a culture has seen Tesco Maryhill become a valued community hub. This development has been somewhat organic, relying partly on a close-knit neighbourhood and longstanding staff members. But management has also implemented policies incentivising staff autonomy and a proactive ‘Can we?’ approach to customer interaction, including KPIs relating to kindness over profit. Many decisions, meanwhile, are made collaboratively with staff. Finally, the store cafe gives this community spirit a physical space in which to thrive.

Many major UK supermarkets are grant funders. This is too general to be considered relationship-centred design per se. But one feature worth noting is the use of supermarket employees, such as Tesco’s Community Champions, or members, like The Cooperative’s Member Pioneers, to develop links between supermarkets and local community organisations to help better target supermarkets’ community work.

Given their reach, supermarkets also help understand and advocate the importance of relationships. For example, Sainsbury’s and The Cooperative have been involved in developing nationwide wellbeing indexes, both featuring social relationships as core components.

72 UK Tesco stores have specially designed Community Spaces that community groups can use for free. Marks and Spencer, in partnership with Frazzled Cafe, similarly offers its cafe spaces to host regular, safe ‘talk in’ sessions for people feeling ‘frazzled’.