is an animated 2018 miniseries created by Jack Stauber for [adult swim] as one of their "smalls".A guy has a hard time figuring out what type of yogurt sample he'd like to try. Resolving to come back later, he finds his day of grocery shopping at the store filled with weird people and his own brain running too fast for him to keep up.
It premiered in five installments from March 4th to 8th of 2018, though it works just as well as its own short film that clocks in at about thirteen minutes, the length of your average cartoon episode.
Tropes on sale, get them while they last!:
- Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance: Each focal character's head is shaped like the item that the guy met them in the aisle for. This includes the main character, as his hair has a curl representing a yogurt sample.
- Bland-Name Product: The packaging for the bread the protagonist chooses looks suspiciously like Wonder Bread, but is called Wowza.
- Book Ends:
- The series begins with the main character unable to decide what free sample he wants. The series ends with the main character going back and deciding on a sample.
- The first and last items on the main character's list are dairy products: Milk's focus song was about its shelf life and signals the start of his grocery overthinking, while Cheese and Yogurt is a byproduct of what happens after milk expires, signalling his desire to stop overthinking things and roll with the punches.
- Brand X: Apart from the bread, washrag, and to a lesser extent the cheese, all the items the protagonist picks up are just labeled "Milk", "Oatmeal", "Coffee", etc.
- Denser and Wackier: Inverted. Unlike the incredibly weird videos that Jack Stauber usually makes, SHOP has a story that's relatively easy to follow, songs with lyrics that are clear, and a message that's clear cut. It's still weirder than most things you'll come across, though.
- Eleven O'Clock Number: The "Five Aisles of Grief" number is the last one to deal with the protagonist's hangups before directly leading into the very last song, which has him speed through all the grocery metaphors from the previous episodes.
- Emo Teen: The Paper Towel Attendant, who goes on edgelord tangents with barely any provocation.
- "Eureka!" Moment: The main character protagonist has this when he looks at the type of cheese he picked ("Dairy-Free Maple Coconut Water Cheese") and spouts that he "could have picked something better than that". This causes him to not only figure out the aesops he learned throughout the series from the people he met at the supermarket, but also figure out his own aesop, motivating him to finally pick one of the free yogurt samples.
- The Everyman: The main character of the series is a fairly average person who is meant to bounce off the eccentric characters he meets while grocery shopping. However, he still has his own issues to deal with as "Cheese" confirms.
- Fatal Flaw: Pretty much the only characters that don't exhibit one are the guy giving free yogurt samples and the blink-and-you-miss-them couple looking for vegan hot dog buns, and every flaw plays into its respective segment's Aesop.
- The old lady wanting pecan cookies puts off trying anything new even though she clearly doesn't have much more time to do so.
- The pretentious guy getting artisanal bread for his dog puts too much emphasis on appearances and status.
- The employee dealing with the broken jar obsesses over the consequences of minor messes.
- The guy encountered en route to the oatmeal has obsessively planned everything down to the second, leaving no room for setbacks or mistakes.
- Arlene, the lady in the coffee aisle, is addicted to caffeine to a dangerous degree, such that she's crashing from withdrawal and forgetting her kids at daycare.
- The main character tends to overthink things too much. Just meeting someone new is enough to give him a whole song's worth of an existential crisis.
- Five Stages of Grief: Spoofed with the "Five Aisles of Grief", when the protagonist is overwhelmed by the number of cheese choices, with lyrics that span the five stages with cheese puns mixed in as he visually walks through aisles labeled as such.
- Denial: This can't brie, there's more cheese to choose than I can see
- Anger: You gouda be kidding me; I can't make these decisions on my provolone
- Bargaining If I act better, could someone else select my cheddar?
- Depression: Are these bleus parmanent?
- Acceptance: I'll be okay, I'l look away and let the universe say...
- Formula-Breaking Episode: "Cheese", the Series Finale, breaks from the series's formula. Instead of the main character meeting a "Cheese" person, the main character IS the "Cheese" person. Notably, he doesn't even decide to get cheese by the end while all the other episodes had the protagonist collecting the titular item. He instead decides to get the free sample from the beginning of the series.
- Gonk: The Old Milk Woman is a shriveled-up old woman in a rascal scooter who has carton-shaped hair and looks 5 minutes away from death.
- Gross-Up Close-Up: The Old Milk Woman gets a couple of shots where her face is shown in grotesque detail.
- Grumpy Old Lady: The Old Milk Woman is a bit rude. Instead of asking the protagonist to hand her the cookies from the shelf, she simply repeats "pecan", argues that she said a different "pecan" when rejecting the box of pecan cookies he offers, is dismissive, and asks him if he's deaf for not following her unclear directions.
- Hurricane of Puns: The protagonist's trip through the Cheese aisle has him mentally going through the Five Stages of Grief, making themed cheese puns all the way.
- Hypocritical Humor:
- The Old Milk Lady asks the protagonist if he's deaf, and when he responds that he isn't deaf, she calls him Jeff, mishearing that's his name.
- The protagonist is confused and slightly unnerved by the Paper Towel guy waxing philosophical about cleaning up a spill. He then spends the next minute or so having an existential crisis over the word "Mess" in his head.
- Lame Pun Reaction: The main character asks the "Bread" man, who is getting Artisanal bread for his dog, if his dog is "artisanally bred". The "Bread" man doesn't get the joke and just asks him if he didn't hear him right.
- Motor Mouth: Arlene is so hopped up on coffee that nearly everything she says is one big run-on sentence.
- Mundane Made Awesome:SHOP centers around an average supermarket run, featuring songs inspired by regular grocery items: milk, bread, paper towels, oatmeal, coffee, and cheese. All of these songs are deeply introspective, dealing with things like mortality, materialism, and the difficulty of fixing problems in your life.
- Must Have Caffeine: Arlene drinks so much coffee that she barely takes a breath between any of her words and seems dead if she doesn't continuously sip her cup.
- Nameless Narrative: Arlene the Coffee Lady is the only character in the entire story whose name is revealed, including our main character.
- Non-Indicative Name: The "Bread" song doesn't feature its title grocery as a motif, instead focusing of the use of "Artisanal" on the loaf he found. The concluding song reveals the metaphor is a bit more stealthy, as it refers to "bread" as a slang term for wealth.
- Obsessively Organized: The Oatmeal Guy is so obsessed with scheduling his life that he has his meals planned out through the next week, and wishes he was able to plan that out even further* .
- Paralysis by Analysis: The protagonist's main flaw; he's introduced agonizing over which flavor of yogurt sample to try, and has apparently been at it long enough for the employee manning the booth to get concerned. Near the end he's overwhelmed by the number of cheese options and goes through the Five Aisles of Grief before deciding to look away and choose randomly.
- Phrase Catcher: Several characters ask the protagonist some variant of "What are you, deaf?" when they either mishear him or he takes too long to respond.
- Retraux: Like most of Jack's creations, the animation is run through a VHS to give it a grainy, old feel.
- Rule of Symbolism: Each character (except the protagonist and the samples guy at the beginning and end) look like and represent the item the episode they're featured in is based around. What kind of grocery he gets after his encounter and musings in each episode also represents him adapting to the concerns he's been presented with, with the meaning left for the viewer to realize.
- Milk: A fresh carton, signifying his ability to still make new choices before he 'expires'.
- Bread: A loaf of plain bread, as he's fine with humble cheap bread and desires no pretensions as seen with the bread shopper.
- Paper Towels: An indestructible dish towel, as no matter how many messes it cleans up, it can be used again without creating more waste.
- Oatmeal: A 3-pack of mystery oatmeal, giving him a looser routine compared to the 100-pack, and a chance to experience unexpected outcomes in its flavors.
- Coffee: A package of decaf coffee, letting him enjoy his preference without overindulging in its vices.
- Cheese: No cheese at all, as he can think of better choices than the one he initially laid out. He instead gets the yogurt sample from the beginning.
- Running Gag: Other characters mistaking the protagonist as deaf.
- Surprisingly Creepy Moment: The song for Oatmeal has an unsettling part where the protagonist appears with empty eye sockets and his voice becomes distorted.Every day, my Oatmeal routine
TIME IS MY MASTER, KEEP EVERYTHING CLEAN - Surreal Music Video: The protagonist's burst of thoughts in each segment is represented as one of these.
- Tempting Fate:
- At the beginning of the Coffee segment, the protagonist comments that he has the whole isle to himself for once and he "Better hurry up before—"; cue Arlene showing up and talking his ear off.
- After overthinking his entire grocery list, the protagonist comes to the very last item, anticipating that he can probably pick out some cheese without going through a whole song and dance about it. Not even two seconds later...
And now, a dark walk through the Five Aisles of Grief. - Un-Paused: When Arlene falls asleep mid-sentence and the protagonist wakes her up by tilting her coffee cup so she can take a sip, she perks back up and continues her sentence immediately from where she left off.
