Grandstand. This Saturday, March 26 in the morning, endless lines of customers, sometimes installed twenty-four hours earlier, formed in the major cities of the planet in front of Swatch boutiques to try to buy the latest watch model as soon as it was released.
It is a model resulting from a collaboration between two brands of the Swatch Group, Swatch on the one hand, an entry-level brand, and Omega, on the other hand, a luxury brand, an affordable variation of the mythical Moonwatch, famous since American astronaut Buzz Aldrin wore it on his wrist during the first lunar mission in 1969.
This mass phenomenon reminds us of the long lines of onlookers wanting to buy Apple’s latest iPhone at the turn of the 2010s or the crowds formed in 2019 by the sale of the Lidl food processor, a low-cost competitor to Vorwerk’s Thermomix. . We also think of the near-riots caused in France by an Intermarché offer on Nutella in 2018.
We can also see in it a form of the appropriation of public space which testifies to a desire of people to come together as if to expunge those months when gatherings were prohibited, when social life seemed extinguished. It testifies to a calm and carefree relationship with consumption, where this reappropriation of public space is done by unmasked onlookers, too happy to be able to ostensibly deal with a need for consumption that is more futile than necessary.
Standardization of lifestyles
How else to explain that all these people prefer to wait for hours in the street, with hundreds of strangers sharing the same values and centers of interest, even though the brand has warned that the products sought will be available shortly online, and that These weren’t limited editions.
That this phenomenon was observed in the various world metropolises, where the Swatch boutiques offered this product before it went online, reveals a form of standardization of metropolitan lifestyles in countries with post-industrial economies.
Sometimes “queuing”, as the geographer Michel Lussault reminded us in The advent of the world (Seuil, 2013), responds to a strategy, in the same way as “filtering”, on the part of those who provoke it or ensure its management: one thinks, for example, of queues in amusement parks.
But, here, we are more in a form of communion of the moment for a community of enthusiasts, who wish to be able to recall later having participated in this “festive” movement.
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