August 14, 2025
From a very young age, I have been both familiar with and interested in shopping, buying and selling goods. As you know, I grew up in a family engaged in trade. Together with my siblings, we learned about craftsmanship and commerce from our father and uncles, and how to buy things from the bazaar and marketplace—and negotiate while doing so—from our mother. As I grew older, I witnessed the transformation of shopping culture and marketplaces. What interested me the most was especially the transformation in food retail and the evolution of different types of retail outlets across various categories. People aged forty and older know this well: the “grocery store” was the most common and important place to shop during our childhood. However, I believe those in the same age group will also remember Ferhan Şensoy’s play “Kahraman Bakkal Süper Markete Karşı,” staged in 1991. Those of us who spent our childhood and youth in the 1990s were, in fact, intuitively feeling and observing the message conveyed in the late artist’s play. The storm created by the transformation of the ecosystem in many Western countries was also reaching our country; nothing would ever be the same again.
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