Beyond the Modern Supermarket: Geographical Approaches to the Analysis of Contemporary Australian Retail Restructuring

The recent development of new supermarket forms in Australia (Woolworths Metro and Coles Express) provides important insights into the changing geographical forms of grocery retailing and consumption in Australia. Using a multi‐layered approach designed to integrate three overlapping geographical processes relevant to this issue: urban socio‐economic restructuring, shifting spatial arenas of consumption and the corporate geographies of major retailers, the paper identifies the ways that these developments decentre traditionally dominant supermarket discourses. These new supermarket forms are important because they provide a vehicle for the nation’s two pre‐eminent supermarket chains to extend their retail reach, and effect a blurring of taken‐for‐granted retail categories. Although these developments are new and tentative, they presage wider changes in the emerging geographical structures of Australian grocery retailing, and the linkages between urban spaces and modes of consumption.