Retail's no therapy for me

Why do I hate shopping so very much?

I’D always thought of Hell as a philosophical construct, created to scare the God-fearing into righteousness, rather than an actual real place. But this week I spent an afternoon at Braintree Retail Village.

I was always going to hate it, of course. I loathe shopping for anything other than essentials. As my children have grown into teenagers, every member of my family except me seems to have embraced more and more a day at Westfield Stratford City (300 stores, 1.9million square feet of retail) as a treat, something to be relished, anticipated, savoured and enjoyed. As opposed to eye-roll grumping through the first three shops before stomping off to have a bad-tempered coffee and leaving them to it.

I don’t think I was always like this. I remember on my tenth birthday going to a shopping centre with £4 in my wallet, burning with the excitement of being able to spend such Croesan wealth in Our Price records. That was 1976. These days on family shopping centre adventures I still have £4 in my wallet, but now invariably, after parking, dinner and far too many times being rolled over with the line "if you smile at Dad maybe he'll treat you to it", it’s all I’ve got left on the way home.

Why buy anything at all?

I think my problem is that I see shopping for pleasure as such a wasteful activity. Wasteful of time that could be better spent, wasteful of money, wasteful even of aspiration. Of course many people – young people particularly – go shopping in groups, and that makes it a sociable activity and therefore of value. But is the obligatory purchase of ‘stuff’ really that important? The people I know who approach a day’s retail therapy like they’re going to a theme park do so for the excitement of buying something, yet as their day begins they have no clue what that something will be – a top, a hoodie, a bag, socks, undies, fitness gear, a coat, jewellery. I simply cannot do that.

For me, shopping is a necessary outing for necessary things. But these people, these people have the mantra: “I need to buy something, this is something, therefore I need to buy this.” Sometimes, yes, they will return delighted with the bonus of having bought something really fabulous, but often they will return telling you they’re non-plussed, even unimpressed, with “all I managed to get”. But they still bought it anyway. It was always their intention to buy something, regardless of whether they need it or even want it. Why would you do that?

Even in my record shop days, I had at least a vague notion of what I was going to purchase. It might be the new Abba album, that Madness single or maybe even an older item such as a Beatles or Stones LP that my older brother recommended (presumably so he could borrow and tape it). I always had a target – I never went into town having no clue what I’d come back with. And if the shop couldn’t sell me what I wanted, I didn’t compromise. I never returned home thinking: “They didn’t have the new Elvis Costello single, but that’s okay, I managed to get One Day At A Time by Lena Martell!”

A brand new con

So shopping is unnecessary hell for me, and clothes shopping an even greater devilry. I especially have an issue with designer stores and the magnet of “designer retail parks”. Some branded garments are, I fully accept, exceptionally well made, and in a minority of cases the high price reflects the quality. Other ‘designer’ brands, however, are of a lower manufacturing standard and the high price reflects only that people are stupid enough to pay it, and then flaunt the product like some sort of status symbol. But again, why would you do that? My wife and daughter are both big fans of Hollister which, let’s be clear, do seem from my layman’s eye to make quality products and even, in the context of the inflated scale of these things, generally at prices that don’t require a second mortgage.

But one thing that marks several – a huge number – of the company’s products is the enormous word Hollister right across the chest. We’re not talking a discreet symbol like some brands use, we’re talking huge in-your-face type that screams: “I AM WEARING HOLLISTER!” So let me get this straight, the people buying your goods are paying for the privilege of advertising them for you? If you’re turning people into walking advertising hoardings, shouldn’t you be paying them, not the other way round? Forget the craft of the design or the quality of manufacture, I’m not forking out cash to promote your stuff for you.

Of course people need clothes, and people want to buy the best clothes – or want to think they’re buying the best clothes, or want other people to think they’re buying the best clothes. Whatever. But they don’t need all clothes available to them.

Bargain debasement

Which is why, I think, my issue with this week’s visit to Braintree was that it was all so – well, unnecessary. This was the week after Christmas, when most people and therefore many of these shoppers will have already had a surfeit of free stuff. It was six weeks after Black Friday, which according to retail data shifts goods at an average 25% cheaper than in the so-called January sales. To my mind, a bargain is only a bargain if you needed it anyway.

A friend of mine religiously gets up at Stupid O’Clock every Boxing Day to head for the Cambridge sales, and she never deviates in her ambition – to buy her kids clothes for the whole year. It’s her one shopping day. I get that. You wouldn’t rouse me from my bed to do it, but I understand it, and applaud it. She has to buy these items anyway, so why not do it with planning and foresight for the least amount of money?

But I’d wager, with admittedly a high degree of presumption, and the honest and sincere caveat that people are entitled to spend their cash on whatever they want, that most of those shoppers cramming out Braintree Retail Village – and all the others around the country – did not need those products. And in some cases can’t afford them. And might even, as we’ve seen, been so desperate to buy something, anything, so they haven’t had a “wasted journey’, that they don’t even want them. Yet still they come.

Sell me the experience

So what would make me happy to be here? I don’t know really, although I do know that the whole ‘death of the high street’ narrative caused by a combination of online shopping, the pandemic and out of town shopping centres could be reversed with a little creative thinking.

By, say, making entering stores an excitement that is about more than just spending money. For example, bath bomb store Lush does colourful, entertaining, explosive (and crucially, Instagrammable) experiments. Hamleys in London’s Regent Street is full of enthusiastic toy demonstrators who put on a show and gather crowds. Many independent bookshops hold readings and performances. Customers go in for the fun they’ll have as much as the products they’ll buy.

But there is still little evidence of this right across the retail board, especially in the behemoth shopping centres, where it’s all about the spend, all about the take. Where in the designer outlets are the fashion shows – even with outrageous outfits? Where are the demos of how clothes are made? The Q and As? The interaction between store and shopper that’s about more than just money? Where is the entertainment? Bring that and I will come. I may still not like it, mainly because I am a contrary and fractious sod, but I will come to see. And if I do like, I will come again. And then I may spend. Because I enjoy being there.

The fact that I was the grumpiest coffee sipper at Westfield, or the most sour-faced curmudgeon on the benches at Braintree, does of course suggest to me that I am missing something, and am quite possibly in a small minority of people who just hate such places and the spending they inspire. I don’t doubt I’m out of step and as previously stated, people have a perfect right to spend their time and money as they choose.

But for the moment, I don’t get it, and I still hate shopping. You buy something you don’t like at Braintree Retail Village, you can show your receipt and claim a refund. Unfortunately, of course, you can only get your money back. Not the whole damn wasted day.

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