As singles ditch dating apps, the Spanish are finding love in supermarket aisles—with some help from pineapples
How far would you go to find love? It turns out that just the local supermarket will do if you’re single in Spain.
In recent weeks, a viral trend has taken over the internet—and, more specifically, Spain’s Mercadona supermarkets—by storm. And all it took was a few pineapples.
A new trend is sweeping the singles community in Spain. They are scurrying to different locations of Mercadona (there are around 1,630 stores in the country) between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. They then grab a pineapple from the fresh fruits aisle and place it upside down in their shopping carts, allegedly a signal that they’re looking for love.
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Absurd as it may sound, the trend popularized on TikTok has Spaniards flocking to the supermarket and adding pineapples to their carts—whether or not they want to buy them.
Actor Vivy Lin shared a video on TikTok of herself and a friend taking a trolley around Mercadona last month because it was “the time to hook up.”
Numerous short videos have been shared on the platform since, including one shared by a fan account of the supermarket parodying the trend.
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Mercadona told other news outlets it hasn’t fanned the flames of this TikTok frenzy, and it’s not part of its marketing strategy.
Representatives from Mercadona didn’t immediately return Fortune’s request for comment.
Why are people turning to pineapples? Probably because more of them are turning away from dating apps.
Finding romance can feel like a tedious business in any part of the world. Apps have become complicated to navigate, leaving people to yearn for a more straightforward way to connect. If people are willing to go to great lengths using apps like Hinge, paid subscriptions can give users greater visibility. Raya, for instance, allows people to access its app on an invite-only basis (and payments are involved, too).
Gen Z and millennials have increasingly been ditching dating apps, calling them “wastelands” that make it harder to find real connections. So people have resorted to traditional ways of finding a match, including finding someone through a hobby like a running club or even in the workplace (although that’s seen as taboo).
Since we’re past the heyday of dating apps, the trend of an upside-down pineapple in a supermarket trolley may be the first of many. Whether it proves a success is still as much a matter of luck, though.
“I think maybe because people spend a lot of time just talking on the app, that might be the reason of people getting bored,” Fan, a Barcelona resident who jumped on the trend by visiting Mercadona, told the Washington Post. “On dating apps, for example on Tinder, if you match you start to talk, but maybe you will never meet in person. But if we do it in the supermarket, you can talk face to face.”
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