[A-List] Shopping: How it Became Our National Disease

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We are rapidly turning into a nation of continuous shoppers, unable to walk the
streets without making purchases, however trivial. Somehow we have come to
believe the marketers' hype: we must always treat ourselves - we're worth it.

by Lynsey Hanley

New Statesman Cover story (September 18 2006)


The woman in the NatWest knew what she wanted. "Basically, I need to put it
somewhere where I can't get my grubby mitts on it, 'cos if I know I can, I'll
just spend it all". She was talking about her hard-earned money, of which, in
the shop-laden centre of Nottingham, she could be relieved in a flash.

A bit of a problem, that, unless you have a will of titanium. On a ten-minute
walk through the city's long pedestrianised arcade, I casually inspected, and
very nearly bought, two T-shirts from Muji, reduced from GBP 25 to GBP 5 each; 
a fruit and nut bar and a caffe` latte from Pret A Manger; a haircut; a copy of
the new David Peace novel from Waterstone's; some "thermal spa" flavoured bubble
bath from Superdrug; a pair of flip-flops; and two newspapers.

Even though my own bank account, on that particular day, rang in at minus GBP
1,041.05, I could have bought all these things without anyone telling me off.
There were a good few hundred pounds to go before my overdraft exhausted its
supply of goodwill. It was sheer restraint - or, rather, retraining - that
prevented me from loading up on goods that, though each in its own way
pleasure-giving, were not necessary for my survival.

While avoiding these resistance-dampening opportunities, you are encouraged to
"take a Muffin Break" because, according to the cake stall of that name, you
deserve to treat yourself. You're also asked, in ketchup-red writing the height
of a man's hand, whether you should take a break to have a Wimpy, because surely
you deserve that, too. What with the muffin and the Wimpy, you can quickly
develop a view of the shopping experience as one involving small food rewards
for every few paces you stagger under the weight of bogofs (for those of you who
tend to buy the things you need one at a time, that's an acronym for "buy one,
get one free" offers).

Thirty-one-year-old Richard believes that that's exactly the case. Having run up
GBP 10,000 on credit cards in his early twenties, often on things he can barely
remember buying, he is convinced that sophisticated marketing and the
availability of easy credit make a lethal combination.

"In Nottingham, most nineteen-year-olds would think nothing of spending GBP 50
on bits and bobs in a lunch hour or GBP 100 on a Saturday. At least once every
day, you think: 'I need a pick-me-up'. And whether it's a forty pence bar of
chocolate or forty quid on a shirt, there's hundreds of opportunities to do that
without even thinking about it. The point is, you think you need a treat and the
advertising in shops reinforces it."

Nottingham feels like a city whose air of affluence and cosmopolitanism is built
on the quality and number of its shops. Indeed, consumers in the East Midlands
spend a greater proportion of their weekly income than those anywhere else in
Britain outside London. Nottingham's city centre feels as though it has always
existed solely for people to shop in. We know, of course, that it hasn't: the
city-centre quarter I stayed in, Lace Market, was named after the old lacemaking
industry, through which the city made its first fortune, in the latter half of
the 19th century.

The hotel where I took a room has a directory that offers its customers a
half-page pre'cis of the role of that industry in creating the building in which
you can now sit grazing on minibar-cold Pringles before retiring to a bed
slathered in thick Egyptian cotton. On the next page, under the title "Retail
therapy", begins a list six pages long of Nottingham's shops, boutiques,
concessions, department stores and kiosks, "so that you can maximise your
shopping experience". There are "pricey, funky ladies' high-street fashions" at
Whistles; Reiss, the unisex fashion chain, is housed in "a stunning conversion
of an old chapel" (the Pitcher & Piano wine bar has taken this theme further by
colonising a huge redundant church); Slater mens wear has "branches in just
fourteen gateway cities", a mysterious retail circle of trust that also includes
Birmingham, Glasgow and Basingstoke.

Should the toil of traipsing around six pages' worth of shops become too much
for the mind and feet, and the prospect of a Muffin Break not fill you with
relief, you can visit the UK's only Aveda Urban Therapy "lifestyle salon and spa",
a woodblock-lined room filled with forest-smelling unguents, as if to suggest
that shopping may, after all, create the kind of existential misgivings that can
be quelled only by a return to nature (of a sort).

Alternatively - although neither the hotel nor the local buses, which are
plastered with advertisements for gift vouchers that are valid in all shops in
Nottingham, will tell you this - you can train yourself out of buying things,
but that wouldn't endear you either to the city or to those who believe that if
we all stopped shopping, we would be the immoral agents of Britain's economic
collapse.


Champagne on Fridays

I knew that the British spending boom had started when I saw two women, aged 
no more than twenty and not in the slightest bit posh-looking, walk off a Tube
train in central London each with a bottle of champagne. This was about 1998,
during the lovely long Labour honeymoon, when buying Moet on a Friday - just
because it was a Friday - seemed a perfectly normal thing to do, and hell, we
all deserved it just for surviving the previous eighteen years. I don't know how
anyone got the money, but we did; my boyfriend and I were barely out of
university, and yet we ate out twice a week and bought designer coats. It was
the most exciting feeling in the world, to be able to live in the city and buy
things; it made us feel like pop stars. It seemed to satisfy in us a desire to
feel special.

Now we've grown out of it, we camp for our holidays and are clothed by Primark.
I shop on the high street so rarely that computers have doubled in memory
between my visits to Dixons. I wouldn't say I was disgusted with the younger me;
in fact, I feel oddly proud of the carpe diem spirit that led to my acquisition
of an American Express Platinum Card at the age of 25, though I'd never earned
more than GBP 25,000 a year. Amex gave me the card because I bought things as
easily as I breathed. Stuff never runs out: as long as you show a willingness to
buy it, stuff will be there for you, like a creature that comes to life only
when you choose it to be your friend.

The 25-year-old on 25 grand with a Platinum Amex became a 26-year-old who had
spent GBP 20,000 on credit cards in a single year. It wasn't just the Amex, it
was the Egg; it was the MBNA; it was the Capital One; it was the First Direct
loan, followed by the new Egg card to surf the zero interest rate until its six
months of free credit were up. The GBP 1,000 on one card would be syphoned into
my overdraft, to be replaced by another grand off a different, maxed-out card,
which in turn would be filled to the limit with Habitat cushions. What on earth
made me think that, at the age of 26, I had the right to buy such splendiferous
guff without having first earned - literally, by working and saving - the money
to do so?

"I found it shockingly easy to get a credit card with a generous limit", says
Richard. "I was 22 or 23 at the time and they immediately gave me a limit that
was half my yearly salary. I thought that, by the time I was thirty - which
seemed like an age away - I'd be earning loads and I'd pay it all off without
any trouble. The effect of having so much credit to spend was that things that I
had previously thought I just couldn't afford, all of a sudden I could. The card
was just this plastic thing in a bright colour that gave me free money, or so I
thought."


Don't suppress the urge

The Economic and Social Research Council recently reported that many consumers
are far more ignorant of how credit works than they believe themselves to be. 
Dr David Voas of the University of Manchester, in research for the ESRC, argued
that Richard's view of credit as "free money" is worryingly common: "People
either don't want to think about personal finance or, particularly among the
middle classes, have a deluded view of their own financial capability".

There are other ways in which the casual, but constant, shopper can tell
themselves that their actions have only benign, or even positive, consequences.
"Shopping and social justice are not mutually exclusive value systems, but ones
that most people want to coexist alongside each other; my daughters think as
well as shop and seem fine moral beings to me", wrote the economics commentator
Will Hutton in the Observer last year. The following week the paper received a
wheelie bin's worth of letters accusing him of moral relativism and, worse, of
glib indifference to the toll of personal bankruptcies. To cap it all, he wrote
about gleefully purchasing a GBP 4 "Rolex", a tacit endorsement of sweated
labour.

The point he was making was that, unlike the urge to fight or to steal, the urge
to shop is one that you're positively discouraged from suppressing. You're not
doing anything wrong by using your free time deliberating over the relative
merits of pink tops and green ones, he says, somewhat disingenuously, given that
Hutton is chief executive of the Work Foundation. Shop jobs are filled by
millions, but at hourly rates far, far lower than the skilled manual jobs they
have largely replaced.

Still, consumer spending goes up every month and is seen as a cause for
celebration. In June, as the UK card payments association Apacs revealed,
spending on plastic cards amounted to GBP 26.4 billion. So far this year, we
have spent GBP 151 billion on cards alone, a rise of 6.6 per cent compared to
the same period in 2005. Cities such as Nottingham and Birmingham, its larger,
shop-saturated Midlands neighbour, seem at a loss to fill their centres with
anything other than more places in which to process wealth.


Urban therapy

The idea of urbanity has come to mean a lifestyle that is given routine and
meaning by buying things. It could once have meant promenading, or being able 
to speak more than one language, or attending public lectures, but in the past
twenty years it has been revised to stand for shopping and little else. Cities
are no longer able to support themselves, or the national economy, by making
things; they now do so by selling things made elsewhere.

But Nottingham isn't composed solely of urban therapy spas and delicatessens.
Its Broadmarsh Centre - which sounds, unfortunately, like a high-security mental
hospital, and doesn't do much to dispel that impression once you're in there -
is full of the kinds of shops frequented by people whose poverty, according to 
a recent Institute for Fiscal Studies investigation into household spending,
carried out for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is measured better by how much
they spend than by how much they earn.

The things you buy here are carried out in plain white or unbranded blue plastic
bags rather than in tote bags made of stiff card. Bogofs abound: on trousers,
shampoo, KitKats, Curly Wurlys, frozen burgers and school shirts. It's not urban
or urbane, at least not in the new senses of the words; it's provincial. It's
full of things you need, as well as things you want, although it would be hard
to enter a branch of Poundland without walking out carrying at least twice as
many items as you went in for. Elderly couples and large families stock up
cheaply and invisibly here while the stiff-card-bag boutiques that encircle it
get on with the job of making the rest of the city look cool.

In the everything's-a-pound shop, a man firmly tells his wife that they already
have two badminton rackets, and that there's no room in the garage for more. She
goes instead to pick up a pack of three tennis balls. In the crook of her arm
are stashed two bottles of mint washing-up liquid and a straw dolly. She has a
few spare pound coins to burn. She's not rich, but still she needs treating, if
only with the knowledge that she can afford to make impulse buys: things over
and above those on her shopping list.

Pound shops fulfil precisely the same role as what are known in our household 
as "fiddly-widdly" shops: those boutiques you enter idly on day trips that sell
furry photo frames and scented candles. They kill time, and the ache to be
rewarded simply for existing, nicely. Shopping centres are dark and windowless,
and full of man-made things. Why do we go to them whenever we have free time?
Why do we spend more time in them than is strictly necessary? Why do we attach
greater urgency to the search for a bargain than to sitting in a park and
reading?

A new book by Professor Avner Offer of All Souls College, Oxford, suggests that,
in so doing, we succumb to "myopic choice": once our basic needs are met, we do
the thing that's nearest and easiest to do, rather than the more difficult thing
that might sustain us better in the long term. As Homer Simpson would concur, a
doughnut is much nicer than a rice cake, and slips down more easily. Shopping is
the sugary snack; healthy walks the improving one. One treats - and therefore
affirms - instantly; the other has rewards that are deferred and built up slowly,
and which require sustained effort to realise.

The opening line of Offer's book, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and
Well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford University Press,
2006), provides a succinct statement of his case: "Affluence breeds impatience,
and impatience undermines well-being". To avoid shopping for something you want
is to put off something you enjoy, even though waiting for the treat - until,
let's say, you've got the money to pay for it - is ultimately far more
satisfying.

A few pages later, Offer presents another, equally plausible, aphorism:
"Prudence has built up affluence, but affluence undermines prudence". In other
words, we have historically kept our belts tight and delayed gratification,
which has created a society that is largely comfortably off. Now that we have
all we need, and many of us have built up comfortable nest eggs in the form of
housing equity, we've started to loosen those belts.


Shop more, spend less

Until 2003, says Apacs, British shoppers tended to split their spending on
plastic cards roughly equally between debit and credit cards. Now, seventy per
cent of card transactions are carried out on debit cards, suggesting that
consumers would rather spend as they go with the money - or overdraft - they
have, rather than stack it up on credit cards. Smaller purchases that once would
have been paid for in cash are now dealt with by a swipe of the debit card: a
sensible-seeming habit, but less so when purchases, unlike those made with a
finite supply of hard cash, can add up without you even noticing.

Meanwhile, Bank of England figures show that the number of personal bankruptcy
cases grew by 66 per cent between last year and this, and that, not even
counting debit card spending, in excess of GBP 120 billion is spent every year
on credit cards alone. Not counting debit cards, there are nearly seventy
million credit cards in circulation, spread unevenly among a population of sixty
million. But a combination of low inflation, cheap developing-world labour, and
the law of diminishing returns means that things are getting cheaper all the
time, enabling people to shop more while not necessarily spending more.

A friend in her late twenties, whose parents "would sooner go hungry than pay 
a penny in interest", pays for everything on her debit card, "because the
overdraft then scares me into reining in my spending again". Like Richard, she
quickly saw the folly of spending on credit, but she regularly goes overdrawn in
order to stock up on clothes that she might wear once. "I just think: 'Sod it,
why not enjoy the money?'"

But that still doesn't explain why people choose shopping over other,
potentially more reflective, more relaxing activities. Nobody is forced 
to shop, but - like boozing or surfing the internet - once you do a little, the
temptation is to do a lot. The BBC2 play Shiny Shiny Bright New Hole In My Heart,
broadcast in July, suggested that obsessive shopping is a reflection of humanity
in distress - of people flailing about for meaning in a secular world and buying
things as if the soul were a giant Santa sack that needs filling.

The psychologist Oliver James describes this existential bargain hunt as 
a symptom of what he calls Affluenza. His book of the same name, which is
published next January, offers a remedy for the disease of ceaseless acquisition
that involves forming and maintaining closer human relationships, in order to
close up the void we at present attempt to fill with things we have bought.

Like Offer, James singles out the United States and Britain, with their highly
individualised market societies, as the countries in which you are most likely
to suffer mental health problems. Clearly, he argues, affluence is good for us
in one way but bad for us in another.

"The Affluenza virus", he wrote in the Observer at the start of this year, 
"is a set of values which increase our vulnerability to psychological distress:
placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the
eyes of others and wanting to be famous". But if we know that shopping can make
us unhappy, why do we still do it?

A contrite, but less distressed, Richard thinks he has the answer. "It's like
some other person takes over your identity. I often used to get my bill and I'd
have bought, say, nine things I didn't need or even want in the past week, and
I'd think: 'When did I buy that?' Once or twice I've rung up the bank and said:
'I think someone else has been buying on my card, because I don't remember
buying this'. Then you realise afterwards that it was actually you."

That day in Nottingham, some other person took over my identity and took twelve
items into the Gap fitting room in the expectation of buying one or two. I - or
my mysterious infiltrator - had to suppress the urge to skip to the till. With
three full bags and an overdraft squeaking at its outer limits, I floated down
the high street, past a group of boys displaying the price tags intact on their
baseball caps, a terrier puppy in a bespoke cricketing jumper, and a toddler in
her pushchair dragging a tiny clutch bag in the shape of a woman's basque along
the pavement. I've had less surreal dreams than that.


Credit card debt by numbers

Research by Joshua Hergesheimer

69.9 million the number of credit cards in circulation in the UK

GBP 122.2 billion total credit-card spending in UK retailers in 2005

3.4 million number of credit cardholders in the UK regularly making 
only the minimum repayment

GBP 25 billion average amount spent per month on all plastic cards

64 number of credit-card transactions carried out per second

1.13 million number of debt inquiries the Citizens Advice Bureau dealt with last
year

GBP 32,000 average debt of a client approaching the Consumer Credit Counselling
Service for advice


Copyright (c) New Statesman 1913 - 2006

http://www.newstatesman.com/200609180033


Bill Totten     http://billtotten.blogspot.com/