Mass retail has influenced how people purchase food, but also how food has been distributed throughout the local and global supply chain. Supermarkets are the largest and hold the most power in the agri-food supply chains. They therefore also influence what happened with other possible grocery stores, such as smaller shops, farmers markets and wholesale fruit and vegetable markets. There has been some resistance to the supermarket model. For example, consumer activists have driven some changes through i) local agri-food systems and ii) alternative systems such as fair trade, food sovereignty and supranational certification agencies (Clapp, 2012). The local agri-food system (Systèmes Agroalimentaries Localisés, or SYAL) places emphasis on the community of a specific enclave and its shared forms of knowledge and identity, as well as territorial production. Alternative systems also focus on place but in a socially constructed way, emphasizing the distribution and consumption of a particular good. According to Bowen and Mutersbaugh (2013) SYAL is also linked to environmental characteristics and cultural knowledge, as the political-economic dynamics state to indicate that the territory determines rural development. Extensions of this approach are reflected in cooperative and land-based agriculture in Mediterranean Europe and Latin America, in state-sponsored instructions such as appellations of origin and geographical indications, especially in Latin America and Asia (Bowen and Mutersbaugh, 2013). Alternative Systems contains several different initiatives but with some elements in common, such as the attention to embeddedness, conceived as social connections in which food relationships are circumscribed... at the center of the paper......Glazer, NY (1993 ). Women's paid and unpaid work: Job displacement in healthcare and retail. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Herrmann, A. (2002). Shopping for identity: gender and consumer culture. Feminist Studies: FS, 28(3), 539.Hinrichs, C. C. (2000). Embeddedness and local food systems: notes on two types of direct agricultural markets. Journal of Rural Studies, 16(3), 295-303.Humphery, K. (1998). Shelf life: supermarkets and changing consumer cultures. Cambridge University Press. Koch, S. L. (2013). A theory of spending: Food, choice, and conflict. Bloomsbury Publishing.Koch, S. L., & Sprague, J. (2014). Economic sociology versus real life: The case of spending. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 73(1), 237-263.Veblen, T. (2005). The theory of the leisure class; an economic study of institutions. Aakar Books.