Reimagining Society Through Retail Practice

[Display omitted] •Restaurant Day shows how retail practices are deeply embedded in ways of socializing.•Restaurant Day is a consumer-driven manifestation of carnivalesque mood.•In Restaurant Day the conventional ‘rules’ of retailing are playfully subverted.•Restaurant Day reveals that retailing can be a tool of social change.•Rethinking solidity of location and mutual role of consumers in retail experiences. Marketing scholars with sociological and anthropological leanings have made great strides in uncovering strategic and theoretical implications of consumer collectives and consumption-driven market phenomena. It has not been very common that their perspectives have been brought to bear on retailing practice or theory. This ethnographic study examines a highly successful, globalizing, consumer-driven pop-up retail festival for its potential lessons about social movements. It reveals new insights into logics and potentialities for retailing as a field of affordances for reimagining society and social practices. It points especially to how eruptions of ‘carnivalesque mood’ unite everyday citizens to imagine change in a highly regulated social context and how they utilize the practice of retailing collectively to actualize societal change.