ABSTRACT
In his ethnography of shopping families in London, Daniel Miller (1998) argues that shopping for the family is an important way that love is manifested and reproduced through caring for family members, their preferences and planning for eating together. And, for Miller, family is a practice that is partly constituted through the whole work of consumption (travel, parking, trying out/on, purchasing) (cf. Jain, 2002). Thus, in this chapter we focus on how life phase affects consumer-logistics practices among families with small children. Arguably, mobility is a crucial component of the notion of family in motion with recent purchases. Depending on children's ages and the number of children, going shopping requires quite different settings and gears than before. Iconic objects are, for example, the pushchair and car seats for children that accompany many parents going to the supermarket. Importantly, children's needs, well-being and wishes are included in parents’ logistic-modal choice. And, as Elliot and Urry describe, the complexity of contemporary mobilities not only layers the ordering of space, place and time, but also ‘drains the emotional energies of women and men’ (Elliot and Urry, 2010, p. 96). In the case of shopping with children it is therefore important to consider how the collectiveness of the practice discloses a relational dependence. For example, emotional responses impeding on parents’ expectations, choices and experiences of consumer logistics did not emanate out of the individual (internal states). Rather, urban geography, timing of consumption errands and affordances of modes for travel as well as physical infrastructures produce affective experience or emotional management of bodies in motion and, in this case, families-in-motion.
