How to Avoid the Perils of Modern Shopping

We’re S.H.O.P.P.I.N.G….we’re shopping. – Pet Shop Boys

Shopping used to be so easy. When I was a boy (oh, here we go Grandad), we went grocery shopping once a month and made it last 28 days. February was the only month in which we failed to run out of provisions. It was a day trip ending in playing with boxes on the lawn. Anything lacking was grown on the allotment, which sadly didn’t grow chocolate biscuits or Kellogg’s Frosties. Shops were windows for pressing noses up against.

Despite this, I thought I lived in the future, which is a strange prism through which to see the 1970s, but in light of my father’s wartime experiences, it was Disneyland. But compared with today we lived in Eastern Europe when towns would hang out the bunting and hire a brass band to celebrate the arrival of the first washing machine. Our local toy shop even displayed its toys in glass cabinets like a museum. If you wanted something you asked the owner to jangle his bunch of keys, who slowly opened the case and retrieved the item with scientific precision and might as well have carried it to the counter on a velvet cushion. It was lucky we were allowed to buy anything at all.

Perhaps it’s this that makes me a bad capitalist, as I don’t really like buying stuff. Anyone knowing me will splutter at this, and I mean apart from records. OK, and books. I’m not tight, but share my Grandpa’s reluctance in parting with cash. I’d often rather have the potential of what I might buy than what I do. Unless I’m at a car boot sale then the main problem is that shops don’t sell what I want to buy. There’s apparently no market for vintage American tee-shirts, T.I.E. fighter models and Italo-disco 12″s.

I hate shopping, but it isn’t only the weird rush you get when parting with money you don’t have, but it’s the guilt afterward. Am I really allowed to spend £50 on a pair of trainers in Duty-Free when I bought some three years ago? I swear it’s all the perfume and lack of oxygen that provokes airport spending sprees. It’s like people are bloody looting the place but then having to pay at the till

Online shopping is ideal, so long as you have a workplace to have your shoes, vinyl, etc delivered. The contemporary workplace is really one of those Amazon drop off points that you actually spend all day at and get paid to do so. Eventually, companies will clock this and simply house employees in those large lockers outside petrol stations. We now carry shops about in our pockets.

The longest I’ve seen people off their smartphones, and thus not shopping, was for the hour-long queue for Eruption!, a monolithic water slide in an Italian water park. Instead of the young people swiping about social media it was all bikinis and tight trunks as they contented themselves with draping their nubile bodies over one another like only Italian youth are capable of doing.

Talking of which it was buying a new pair of trunks that took me into a shop, and of course, I left with a pair of jeans and needed to return for the original purpose of going. The lovely shop assistant appeared to have been programmed.

“Would you like bag today?” she asked with a plastic smile while folding the clothes.

“Erm, no, but can I pop in to get one tomorrow?”

It wasn’t an unpleasant experience, but I did wonder if I could afford the pair of jeans I didn’t need. People shop these days with the ease of linen drying in the sun. We all know the cost of things, but not necessarily the value.

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