7 - Requests and Offers to Taste: The Sequential Environments of Tasting

Summary

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).