Shopping is not a hobby and it's not a patriotic duty, either
In troubled times, society needs more than retail therapy to solve its problems
Suzanne Moore
guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 September 2011 20.29 BST
One of the many ways I fail at being a proper woman is that I loathe shopping. Trailing in and out of sweaty changing rooms with friends, as they try on clothes which you are meant to oooh and aaah over, is my idea of hell. I am one of those blokes who sits outside looking bored saying: "Yeah, that looks alright. Buy that." If you can't buy something in 20 minutes, we have a problem, Houston.
Supermarkets overwhelm me and Ikea produces such bizarre mood swings that I have calculated the psychic damage is not worth the money you "save". For a few fevered minutes I do believe that a "storage solution" is the answer to all existential worries but then I come to the till holding two dozen egg cups, some box files and a bargain bath mat and have to have be revived with a plastic hot dog.
Oh yes, I know I should prance around with a basket at organic markets buying stuff from artisanal producers and live in France or Primrose Hill. But I would still find it time-consuming. This is not some pure, ideological position. I like having nice things and I have worked in shops, another job I was stunningly good at. Especially those long months when I was selling engagement rings in a jewellery shop that made Ratners look like Tiffany's.
What I deeply resent is the idea that shopping – especially for women – is some kind of leisure activity. Shopping to feed and clothe a family is often a chore, not a bleedin' hobby. As for window shopping? Looking at stuff you can't afford? Culturally legitimated masochism.
It's no fun, and I know I mustn't mention the war (the riots) or the politics of envy, because anyone who takes the goods that are permanently displayed and advertised to them does it out of pure "criminality". The connection between a consumer culture and looting is an uneasy one. We hide it under the bed like stolen goods.
Surely though, the elevation of consuming as meaningful in itself has been troubling us for a long time. We engage in it even if we aren't all blinged out. Instead we are perpetually anxious about not having enough, or moan about our children having too much even as we buy it for them.
No one talks about materialism any more, for fear of sounding like a Marxist. Away with that downtrodden nonsense! Anti-consumption arguments are seen to come from the joyless greens, "ethical" do-gooders or people with dogs on strings. Don't they know when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping? But the going has got tough. As disposable income falls, it's tough and we can't afford it.
Now, though, shopping for shopping's sake is a patriotic duty. Spending is needed to stimulate the economy, otherwise what will happen?
Actually it's already happened as, er, Marx predicted in Das Kapital: "The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses". It may be no longer de rigeur to talk of poverty or the masses, but what Marx did speak of with great clarity was a system whereby the developed world would have the capacity to provide more goods and services than the proletariat could buy. This flow of goods and services expands just as the numbers of people at the bottom cannot purchase them. This produces a crisis.
But hey, we shouldn't talk about Marx when we have Mary Portas, who is here to reverse the decline of the high street. Portas is passionate and bossy, as all TV experts have to be. She is not an urban planner but is frank about the problem, that many of our high streets have a third of their shops boarded up. The big chains have killed off the small shops and many of us shop online.
For me online shopping is a wonderful liberation, saving me both time and money. I actually spend less than I would if I went to a supermarket.
Of course, it doesn't work for many who are lonely and for whom a trip to the shops is the only time they see anyone. Yet Portas is right to say that many people seem also to like the Tescofication of Britain. It's cheap and convenient for some.
We don't actually put our money where our mouths are. We want quirky individual city centres at the same time as driving to retail parks.
Growth – another fantasy we are being sold – depends on small business. Yet every part of this current fiscal crisis is caused by things getting too big. We need to break down the big businesses and the big banks to enable a fairer system. This is the last thing a laissez-faire Tory government will do. Planning permission continues to be given to huge supermarkets that have no obligation to give something back to locals. The best thing on offer is usually a profitable multiplex. We have to make some choices. I can't boo-hoo about empty shops when homelessness is on the increase. Why can't people be housed in city centres? We continue to admire conspicuous consumption from one class but not another, when the reality is that we simply do not need so much stuff. Nonetheless, this insatiable desire is constantly stimulated.
When a handbag costs as much as a nursery nurse's salary, you know what? I think some of us are not worth it. To say otherwise is a lie. The built-in obsolescence of electrical goods is as obscene as that of so–called "fashion". Thank god that second–hand, now made over as "vintage", is back.
Overconsumption backfires in every way, from obesity, to debt, to sheer misery. Strangely, all indices of happiness show that reducing rather than expanding consumer choice brings down anxiety. Our identities must be forged out of something other than what we buy.
Next week a new Westfield opens. It's not in west London, it's in the east, in Stratford. It will cash in on the Olympics. Is this what this deprived area really needs? Another giant, weatherless mall that has exactly the same shops as everywhere else? Maybe this deliberately disorientating social space will be a place of connection and hope. Maybe it will offer the local youth something other than an expensive bowling alley, a multiplex and some minimum-wage jobs. Like all these palaces of excess, it will have to be totally monitored and patrolled. To say that during the riots people stole what they thought were trappings of the good life is not to defend them. Their poverty of ambition was personal as well as political. A plasma-screen TV and a pair of trainers. Hardly the stuff of dreams, but of an imagination strangled at birth.
All the talk of disenfranchisement and lack of belonging are acted out, sometimes murderously, around consumption. The markets are out of control. So are we. We could value each other for something other than what we buy. We could say less is more. We could let shops shut. We could break up the monopolies. Only a deeply troubled society would think retail therapy could cure it. Shopping will not save our souls. We have been consuming that illusion for way too long.
Shopping is not a hobby | Suzanne Moore | Comment is free | The Guardian
Shopping is not a hobby and it's not a patriotic duty, either
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