How can anybody find joy in the act of shopping? I don’t mean buying things, which is obviously an absolute delight (providing it’s consumer electronics, or occasionally shoes), but actually going shopping. Shopping is an unpleasant necessity, which impinges into your free time, with its only redeeming feature being, once it’s over, that you don’t have to do it again for a while. The internet is a godsend for the likes of me. When you run out of a staple, or are compelled to make a purchase of, say, something electronic, or a pair of shoes, you can open up Ebay, and (excluding the time it takes to be sidetracked by the designer sunglasses, or wellington boots the website so thoughtfully attempts to foist upon you), in five minutes you can get it conveniently consigned to your front door. Usually when you are out, but you can’t have everything.
Shopping is made into such a soul-destroying horror show in part by the interaction it necessitates. I enjoy small-talk as much as the next person, providing the next person’s natural inclination to gregariousness is outweighed by their social and linguistic ineptitude. And I will often strike up a pointless, frequently borderline inappropriate conversation, in a lift, or when waiting for public transport. But the till assistant’s failsafe line of bonhomie, in my recent experience, seems to consist solely of: “This is nice, isn’t it?” And when I reply, deadpan, “Yes, that’s why I’m buying it,” I just look like the sociophobic smart-ass that I am desperately trying not to be found out as.
My natural laziness means that full-time work and I are not closely acquainted. But during a recent, brief stint of working five days a week, and getting in late after a long commute, the shining light at the end of the hideous drudgery (even though it was work experience in a dream job), was the thought of getting blind drunk on a Friday night. The concept of dutifully going to bed sober and early, in order to be fresh for a lovely bout of shopping on a Saturday, seems to me, the ultimate waste of an evening. A evening on which, since time immemorial, (or at least since the invention of the five day working week), people have got blind drunk. It’s a lovely tradition which has suddenly become a social anathema. But I won’t start about the hypocrisy of society’s sudden horror at so-called binge-drinking (i.e., anything more than three pints), because that’s an essay for a different day.
Shopping alone is a tolerable hardship; one can walk briskly from shop to shop, assessing the goods, before swiftly deciding upon what to buy. But shopping with one or more other/s becomes an actually painful experience. Meandering in retail outlets makes my feet hurt. It is also the only activity known to man which aggravates a normally dormant collar bone injury I sustained at the age of twelve.
I recently had to acquire a new shirt for a job interview. I knew exactly what I wanted; a plain, tailored ladies shirt, with no frilliness, and in a muted colour. I wanted to appear serious at my interview, and since I am in possession of pale bleached blonde hair, I decided that this called for as conservative a shirt as possible, to go with a grey check pencil skirt. Black was out, as it gives the impression that one works in a pub. White, coupled with a grey skirt (and bleached blonde hair), makes one appear slightly too much like a model in a schoolgirl fetishists website. It had to have at least three quarter length sleeves, to hide a frankly nautical tattoo I had applied to my bicep when seventeen. Not a big ask, but naturally unobtainable in the not-metropolis of Crewe. In the end I settled for a sensible-ish pink affair, tried it on in Marks and Spencer’s, and was almost moved to tears by the wonderful service of their changing room staff. “Ring the bell if you need any help.” No!!! Why would I have the impertinence to put you out like that? It’s a £9 shirt! The first one didn’t fit, and when I came out to return the shirt, and suggest that I’d try a different size, the assistant (who actually broke off a conversation with a colleague in order to speak to me), offered to go and get me the other size. From a rack which was about five paces from the changing room. I didn’t know with whom I was the most disgusted. With me, for succumbing to the sophisticated and urbane service of Marks and Spencer’s Crewe branch – almost Saville Row in its commitment to fulfilling the customers tailoring needs – or with them for kowtowing to my apparent shopping whims. Me, being so parochial, so provincial, so overjoyed that I found myself feeling special because I was trying on a cheap shirt. Or them, for their institutional obeisance, imbuing pathos into me for both myself and the people working there. This is a level of emotional commitment and investment which I do not need from a quick trip to the shops for a shirt which I am compelled to buy, but don’t really want. And this is why I prefer to shop on the internet.
Of course, in the earlier days of Ebay, when it was more a site for individuals offloading their old junk for pennies, and less a marketplace for corporations flogging their shop-soiled or slight-seconds wares, this interaction could be achieved online, in a much more pleasing way. A seller or buyer might send you a missive to express their delight at their/your purchase. You could then respond to that message with drunken glee when you happened to be in bed with your laptop at 1 am. This was the Golden Age of shopping. Pleasant small-talk on your terms, with a human being, not on hourly pay, whose pleasure at you having made a purchase/sale is genuine. Internet shopping should not necessarily rule out the human contact of going into a shop. It should enable the consumer to be civil at their own pace, and in their own time. And with the aid of alcohol, if they find it absolutely necessary.
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