This chapter examines sequences of offers by sellers in gourmet shops, video documented in a dozen cities across Europe, focusing on offers of a taste of cheese. Such offers to taste are shown to occur in two types of sequential contexts. They are made when a customer has expressed interest in a product but displays some hesitation in deciding whether to purchase it or not. Such offers to taste pursue sale of the cheese; they are not simple small gifts. Participants orient to this character of the offers by treating them as providing assistance in decision making. On the other hand, if the offer is made sequentially too late or too early, it is rejected, underlining the pursuit of sale at work in an offer of a taste. A contrasting environment of offers is also examined. In these cases, a plate of small pre-cut pieces of cheese are on the counter for anyone to try. The offers are typically accepted by the customer but without leading to buying. This enriches our understanding of the preference organization of offers and requests, and the relationships between benefactor/beneficiary, further supporting the relationship between the offer and the pursuit of the offerer’s interests.

The chapter sketches the panorama of research that has characterized shop encounters in order to situate the contributions of the book. It first adopts a broader multidisciplinary perspective on studies of language and talk in shop encounters, reviewing research conducted from a diversity of perspectives in linguistics, sociolinguistics, micro-sociology, linguistic anthropology, ethnography of communication, and discourse analysis. It then turns to introduce a more focused approach centered in ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EMCA) studies of shop interactions, discussing studies on recurrent actions and sequences of actions in shop encounters, the centrality of the material ecology of shop encounters and embodied conduct, as well as orientation to the commercial core and economic consequences in the organization of shop encounters.

The chapter examines the formatting of initial turns by customers at the counter, before they decide and in order to select what to buy. On the basis of recordings in bakeries in Finland, France, and Switzerland, it is shown how customers may face a range of practical problems in making decisions as to what or whether to purchase, including seeing items that might look appealing but which they don’t recognize or for which they do not know the ingredients. Through the design of their questions, drawing on verbal, material, and embodied resources, customers make publicly available to the sellers their epistemic access to the products (e.g., they do not know enough about the item to formulate its identity with anything more than a demonstrative pronoun or demonstrative determiner plus ‘empty’ noun). With their answers sellers provide information that may be immediately useful for the customer in making their decision, or which may need further elaboration. The referential practices employed by both customers and sellers reveal features of items that are locally relevant for the practical purposes of buying, in particular sequential, material, and embodied locations in interaction.

The chapter examines the transfer of the item(s) from the customer’s hands into the hands of the seller. This transfer is a crucial part of many commercial transactions, as the seller must enter the item number into the shop’s inventory system, both to learn the price and to subtract the item from inventory. Exploring data from ‘kiosks’ or convenience stores across Europe, the precise details of this manual transfer of items are examined There are two general methods by which the transfer is enacted: in the first, the customer gives the item directly into the hand(s) of the seller; in the second, the customer places the item on the counter and the seller picks it up. Which method unfolds depends on a variety of factors, including the seller’s physical availability at the moment the customer approaches the counter, the kinds of items purchased, and whether the seller has anticipated the transfer by reaching out their hand, in a shape recognizable as ready to ‘take’. These two methods are seen to reveal the moral and commercial nature of the manipulation of objects, and ultimately of the transaction.

This chapter deals with action ascription in shop encounters. The study relies on video-recordings in cheese shops in twelve European countries and focuses on sequences in which the seller recognizes when the client has taken the decision to buy, even if s/he has not explicitly announced or manifested it, and displays this ascription in order to progress to the next phase of the encounter. The study analyses the sequential environment of such events, the local ecology of the activity and the multimodal resources the participants rely on for ascribing actions. Decision-making and the ascription of that decision by the other party is a crucial moment in a sales encounter. When a customer hesitates which product to buy, the seller often offers a sample to taste. After tasting, the client decides whether to buy. In this sequential environment, positive assessments (“excellent”), as well as minimal responses (“yes”, or a nod) are treated as grounds for ascribing the decision to buy to the client. The analyses highlight the role of embodied actions in the ascription of action and the multimodal formatting of the actions preceding it, showing the relevance and intricacy of these praxeological and sequential environments.

Entering the gourmet cheese shop, the customer is confronted with dozens and sometimes hundreds of different cheeses. This chapter discusses how the search, identification, and selection of a possible buyable is accomplished, through actions that characterize the beginning of the purchase and that are consequential for the possibility (or not) to engage in a closer sensorial exploration of the materiality of the cheese. The first access to the cheese products is distant, characterized by sighting, looking and starring, within actions that either display the customer knows what they want or not. Chapter 3 shows how customers not knowing what they want look around in the shop asking for advice or/and then adopt a focused look on one product and ask questions about it. These actions constitute a praxeological, interactional and sensorial context that emergently projects the relevance of a closer examination of the materiality of cheese.

As seen for touch and smell, the closer sensorial access to the materiality of the product is characterized by an orientation of all participants to the normativity of sensorial practices, which might be forbidden – for reasons of hygiene and for preserving the integrity of the product – but also permitted – when that is relevant for the progression into the selling encounter. In the case of tasting, the customer either requests to taste or is offered to taste. Tasting as a sensorial access to the object supposes its ingestion and therefore its destruction: this practical problem is solved by the seller cutting a tiny sample from a bigger piece and giving it to the customer. The chapter explores the distinctive circumstances in which tasting is requested and offered and their consequences for the next actions, explored in Chapter 8. In particular, it focuses on the sequential environments in which offers to taste are produced by the seller, which connect back to some epistemic features emerging at the very beginning of the purchase (explored in Chapters 3 and 4).

Touch constitutes a closer sensorial access to cheese, enabling to check its texture and consistency and inferring its creaminess, intensity, and maturity. However, touch is often forbidden in specialized shops. This chapter explores the paradoxes of touch as a both a normatively constrained practice and a crucial access to some essential sensorial qualities of the product. On the one hand, the seller has a privileged right to touch the cheese, within a form of “professional touch” – in the form of palpating movements of the hand – that can take the form of diagnostic checks orienting to the evolving state of the cheese or of demonstrative gestures addressed to the customer. On the other hand, the customer can obtain the right to touch the products in some circumstances, either requesting permission to touch or being offered to touch by the seller. Touching the cheese contributes to the selection of specific items, orienting to the unicity of each piece of cheese as far as its consistency, maturity, and organic evolution is concerned. So touching accesses specific relevant sensorial features that are crucial for evaluating cheese and making decisions about its selection and purchase.

An alternative way of initiating the purchase consists for the customer in requesting a specific product. The way requests are formatted, and the way they are produced by looking and possibly pointing at the products, displays whether the customer is a connoisseur or a novice, and project the relevant service expected. The seller provides for a differentiated response to requests displaying more or less knowledge of the requested product. Whereas customers knowing what they request just name the product and are fetched with it, customers not fully knowing what they request are responded to in a more expanded way by the seller. The seller engages in informing – providing a diversity of verbal information about the cheese, within an expert and relatively standardized discourse –  and in showing the product, associating visual characteristics with verbal descriptions. When this is considered by the participants as an insufficient basis for decision-making, the seller offers them to taste the cheese. In this way, the access to the materiality of cheese is provided, depending on the sequential unfolding of the interaction, in a stepwise way ordering vision, talk, and closer sensorial approaches, like touch, smell, and taste.