The multimodal use of resources in social interaction, such as syntax, prosody, and body movements, has recently been discussed under the concept of embodied interaction (Streek, Goodwin, & LeBaron Reference Streeck, Goodwin and LeBaron2011). While multimodality in conversation has been widely explored across languages like Chinese (Li Reference Li2014), English (Zima & Bergs Reference Zima and Bergs2017), and Japanese (Mondada Reference Mondada2018), multimodal practices in commercial interactions remains relatively understudied. This gap motivated Barbara Fox, Lorenza Mondada, & Marja-Leena Sorjonen to compile Encounters at the counter: The organization of shop interactions, a pioneering volume focused on the dynamics of conversation between sellers and customers. It examines the entire transaction process—from the emergence of a product need to the final payment—offering insights into how economic value, ownership, and social norms are jointly constructed through verbal exchanges and embodied, material practices.
The volume includes seven chapters across four parts, each analyzing different stages of shop interactions: decision-making, product transfer and packing, retrieval of repaired items, and payment. Drawing from video-recorded data in naturalistic settings, the contributors analyze these encounters through the lens of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA), revealing how everyday economic exchanges are shaped by sequential organization, materiality, and bodily conduct.
In the introduction, Mondada, Sorjonen, & Fox conceptualize shops as social and cultural spaces where norms of politeness, expertise, and interpersonal relations are negotiated. They argue that shop interactions offer a unique window into sociability, governed by the methodical organization of actions. EMCA is used to show how participants structure sequences through both verbal and embodied means, shaping the flow of interaction in real time. The volume’s EMCA perspective emphasizes that, although shop encounters may appear routine, they are locally occasioned and socially significant.
Shop interactions are not only institutional and workplace encounters, but also materially anchored, involving objects like packaging, money, and the goods themselves. While past EMCA research has analyzed phone and online commercial exchanges, this book focuses specifically on in-person service counter encounters, where goods are physically transferred. These settings, with their repetitive yet variable structure, allow researchers to identify patterns in interactional behavior, from requesting and questioning to paying and packing.
Part I, encompassing chapters 2 to 4, addresses the interactive process of decision-making during shopping. In chapter 2, Elwys De Stefani analyzes how couples in Swiss Italian supermarkets formulate product requests. Rather than treating requests as isolated, De Stefani traces their emergence from the start of a shopping trip, showing how they are influenced by joint assessment of available products and sometimes modified or abandoned.
Chapter 3, by Katariina Harjunpää, Mondada, & Kimmo Svinhufvud, examines customer inquiries at European bakery counters. Customers often struggle with identifying items or understanding ingredients, prompting sellers to respond with clarifying information. These exchanges reveal how epistemic asymmetries and interactional contingencies shape purchase decisions.
In chapter 4, Mondada focuses on sensory experiences like tasting. She contrasts personalized taste offerings made during a sale with more general cheese sample displays. Sensory cues become central to shaping customer decisions and illustrate the multimodal nature of sales interactions.
Part 2, which includes chapters 5 and 6, examines the interactional behavior surrounding product transfer and packaging. In chapter 5, Mondada & Sorjonen study item handovers at European kiosks. Transfers typically occur in one of two ways: direct handover or placement on the counter. This choice depends on factors like physical availability, item type, and anticipatory gestures. These moments are crucial for tracking inventory and pricing, and they reveal the fine-tuned coordination between sellers and customers.
Chapter 6, by Anna Lindström & Fox, examines packaging practices at a Swedish farmers’ market. Here, customers usually pack their own items, but sellers take responsibility for bulk items like potatoes. When these norms are breached—such as when customers offer to help—such offers can be morally evaluated and reflect underlying assumptions about autonomy and entitlement.
Part 3 and Part 4 explore the interactions between customers and shop owners during the return of repaired items and payment. In chapter 7, Fox & Trine Heinemann analyze interactions around the return of repaired goods. They identify three formats for returning items: placing the item on the counter before ringing up the sale, demonstrating the repair, or prompting a verbal response. Each method elicits different types of customer responses and reveals expectations about evaluation, expertise, and accountability in service exchanges.
Chapter 8, by Mia Halonen & Aino Koivisto, explores how the timing and visibility of payment methods—cash or card—affect the flow of interaction. When customers show their payment method before the seller announces the price, transactions unfold more efficiently. Delayed display can lead to uncertainty and slower processing. These findings show how even nonverbal cues like the presence of money play a role in shaping interactional trajectories.
Encounters at the counter draws on video-recorded interactions in naturalistic settings, avoiding researcher intervention. This approach captures both verbal exchanges and the embodied, material dimensions of shop interactions. The volume concentrates on a particular type of encounter: those at service counters, where goods are either requested and retrieved by the seller or presented by the customer for registration and payment. These brief, routine exchanges offer a structured context for seller-customer interaction.
Because of their standardized nature, contributors were able to gather a substantial dataset, revealing systematic patterns in key actions such as requesting, questioning, object transferring, packing, and paying. Counter-based interactions thus offer an ideal site for analyzing how situated actions are organized, formatted, and sequenced. A central contribution of this volume is its systematic analysis of embodied conduct within these sequential environments, encompassing not only bodily actions like requesting, offering, assessing, and questioning, but also the manipulation of material objects—gazing, grasping, moving, inspecting, touching, and occasionally tasting.
The volume explores how materiality is managed during transactions, uncovering core aspects of economic exchange. Objects are presented both collectively as potential purchases and individually as focal points when selected or handled. Additional materials—such as packaging and money—play key roles. Money, in particular, is not only a legal medium of exchange but also a physical object (bill, coin, card) embedded in the embodied flow of the transaction. This attention to materiality aligns with broader studies in critical discourse and semiotics. For instance, Machin & Cobley (Reference Machin2020) explore how furniture and packaging convey cultural and economic meanings, while Xiang (Reference Xiang2021) demonstrates how verbal, visual, and embodied modes of communication combine to produce transactional meaning across cultures.
Foregrounding the interplay between language and material handling, the book reframes our understanding of economic encounters. The exchange of items—sometimes touched, tasted, or visually examined—shapes the flow of interaction and reflects shifting roles and rights. These small-scale actions define what is considered a purchasable item, a sample, or a completed sale, and they highlight relationships among customership, connoisseurship, and service, reflecting differing levels of expertise, entitlement, and desirability.
Such interactions foster trust in expertise and judgment, influencing perceptions of good service and customer relationships. The book effectively shows how sociability, material engagement, and commerce are deeply interwoven. Shop interactions, in turn, illuminate broader social processes like shared attention, mutual recognition, intersubjectivity, and normative alignment.
Beyond its strong theoretical insights, Encounters at the counter offers a rich portrait of everyday social life. The authors make mundane interactions fascinating, encouraging readers to reassess the significance of routine encounters. Academic yet accessible prose, along with concrete examples, ensures the book remains engaging.
However, the volume’s strength—its focus on interactional minutiae—may also be a limitation. Readers unfamiliar with ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) may find the dense transcripts and technical terminology challenging. Moreover, while the settings examined are diverse, the book could benefit from a more explicit discussion of how its findings apply to digital or hybrid retail environments, which are increasingly prevalent.
Overall, Encounters at the counter is an essential resource for scholars of multimodal interaction, retail studies, and the sociology of commerce. By integrating ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and semiotic theory, it sheds light on the complex social and cultural dimensions of economic exchanges. Its nuanced approach lays a foundation for future research into the semiotics of everyday commercial life.
