Organized flirting in supermarkets, new trend in Spain

It all started with a video posted on TikTok by a Spanish actress. The experiment has since become a viral phenomenon.

It’s the new trend coming from Spain on social networks. Going to supermarkets to flirt, the idea was launched by a Spanish comedian actress in a video posted on TikTok on August 20. Vivy Lin’s publication exceeded one million views on Saturday, August 31, and hundreds of videos are circulating about flirting in supermarkets.

In this Madrid supermarket, “flirting time” has begun. Between 7pm and 8pm, those who want to find their soulmate must take a pineapple and place it upside down in their shopping cart: this is the instruction so that the “interested” can recognize each other. And it seems to be working since there is only one pineapple left in the fruit and vegetable section. Next to the display, young teenage girls laugh happily, with their pineapples upside down. “We came together! Some of them have boyfriends but not all of them, so we came with them. It’s very funny,” they confide.

“We look to see if they look good. If they do, then we hit their cart!”

Young people from Madrid

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This clash between caddies is what we call “playing a match,” explains Diego, 16, who also came with his friends: “If there is a lightning strike, you have to hit the other person’s shopping cart and then you start talking to him, he explains. It’s a bit strange but it’s nice because it encourages young people like us to socialize in a different way, outside of screens.”

Most of the “pick-up artists” present are teenagers. For them, this new fashion is a way to have fun, but also to talk to each other, to get out of their routine and to flirt in a different way, and not on social networks. Inma, 50, has simply come to do her shopping, but she looks at her young people in an amused way: “It’s a new format, it’s not my style, but it’s better than virtual, because here it’s concrete : a look, a smile or the scent of someone who will awaken your passion.”

For Alicia López Losantos, psychologist and director of the Lazos marriage agency, it is a brilliantly orchestrated marketing campaign by the supermarket chain. And on a sentimental level, she is very critical. She does not approve of the frivolous vision that is transmitted of couple relationships, even if she is aware that it is increasingly difficult to flirt. “Many young people today don’t really know how to start a flirtation. Seduction has completely disappeared, she concedes. It’s the consumer society: quick and superficial relationships. So it’s very difficult to find a real partner, people who are looking for commitment, a relationship. Loneliness is becoming the pandemic of the 21st century.”

Flirting in Spanish supermarkets will probably be a passing fad, but it will at least have had the merit of highlighting the limits of virtual flirting.