[ Preface ] [ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ]  [ Notes ]

2: Tales From the Crypt of Consumption: Shopping Sturm und Drang

August, learned and exceptionally well-read intellectuals that you all undoubtedly are, it may have surprised you to discover that shopping is a pernicious, deeply hateful, irredeemably iniquitous activity.  After all, here we are in the hedonistic, promiscuous, avaricious, decadent, affluent, opulent, epicurean, consumption-driven, dog days of the twentieth century.  Aren’t we?  Of course we are!  The shops are full, the restaurants are overflowing, plastic cards are melting, package holidays are proliferating, luxury car sales are accelerating and our ever-deepening debts are endlessly deferrable, or so it seems.  The Lottery is already a national institution.  The Church of England employs a marketing manager. The Queen sells trinkets at Buckingham Palace.

More importantly perhaps, the sociologists have finally discovered consumption.¹ Having wrestled with -- and been roundly defeated by -- diverse forms of production, use values’ vaporisation, the endless circulation of capital and indeed the continuing recalcitrance of the proletariat, not to mention the obduracy of the petit bourgeois nexus, our sociological brethren seem to have thrown in the towel and turned their attention to consumer society.  Disconcerting though it is to think that some people still use words like ‘nexus’, ‘bourgeois’ and ‘proletariat’ (worse, they continue to wear baggy cardigans and cords, drink halves of Old Peculiar and smoke meerschaum pipes -- and that’s just the feminists), it is undeniable that books with ‘consumption’ on the cover are pouring from the sociological presses.² 

According to these snazzy volumes, shopping has taken on a whole new significance, a new meaning in people’s lives. Well, that’s what they tell us, anyway. (Naturally, it meant absolutely nothing before our sociological confreres took up the consumer cudgel.) We are no longer defined, it transpires, by what we do for a living but by the brand names we ceaselessly consume.  These days, it would appear that Opium is the opiate of the masses, Praxis a rinky-dinky Greek restaurant in Notting Hill and Hegemony a building society based in some grimy but gentrifying mill town up north. Consumption is the be-all and end-all of contemporary post-industrial, post-Fordist, post-haste, post-dated, post-no-bills, post-IT notes society.  Verily, the sociologists have migrated from a production to a marketing orientation.  As Marx himself might have put it, if I hadn’t got there first, a spectre is stalking Europe - the spectre of Kotlerism.³

Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing but admiration for our hairy-arsed comrades and fellow retailing revolutionaries in the sociological bunker.⁴  Compared to economists, for example, they are the very salt of the earth.  The downtrodden salts of the earth, of course, since they like to consider themselves oppressed and I think we should try to humour them.  What’s more, the all round standard of scholarship in the sociology journals, the sheer sophistication of their theoretical perspectives, is light years ahead of the hypothesis-testing, consumer-as-information-processor, look-ma-no-insight crapola that continues to adorn the principal organs of marketing and consumer research.  You know the kind of thing I’m referring to. We-ran-a-2x2-pencil-and-paper-experiment-concerning-hypothetical-product-attributes-on-a-class-of-200-students-in-a-mid-western-university-town-for-which-they-received-course-credit-and-yes-they-do-prefer-the-box-with-the-flip-top-lid-over-the-one-with-plastic-sheeting-that-takes-a-pneumatic-drill-to-penetrate-though-our-findings-are-only-tentative-and-futher-research-is-necessary. Spare us the further research, for God’s sake.  Anything but further research.

Even worse is the bluff, pragmatic, no-nonsense, eh-laddie, look-em-in-the-eye, ball-breaker-handshake, hail-fellow blowhard-er.  You’ve met the type. “I was at the sharp end of extruded aluminium sales management for twenty years before coming into academic life, kiddo, and I have developed a model, an abortion of badly drawn boxes, arrows and squiggly bits, which synthesises my vast practical experience. Something you don’t have, sonny”.  It also explains why his company went down the tubes and he was forced to seek employment as a lecturer, even though he spends most of his time lining his greasy pockets with nice little consultancy earners.  I ask you, why do we continue to defer to these people?  Pass round the hat, I say, and let’s see if we can raise enough venture capital to send them back to the sharp end whence they came.  They’ll fail again, of course, but if it  keeps them out of our hair for a while, it’s money well spent as far as I’m concerned.

While latter-day sociological contributions are much more meaningful than those of the  Type I, Type II Error brigade (albeit their real error was doing the experiment in the first place) or the matrices were good enough for me they’re good enough for my students mob (though, Lord knows, I’ve forged -- and I mean forged -- one or two matrices in the not too distant past),⁵ the picture of postmodern consumption they present bears no resemblance whatsoever to the realities of going shopping.  True, we can’t expect too much from people who still see red in tooth and claw capitalism under the bed, have only just woken up to the fact that consumers aren’t the unthinking dupes of legend and are secretly enthralled by all the marketing stuff - ads, shopping centres, product launches etc. - that they continue to write so condescendingly about.  But surely you’d think that sociologists, of all people, would be cognisant of their own susceptibility to false consumer consciousness. 

If these people really believe that we live in a love-to-shop society I can only assume that they have never shopped themselves or, if they have, they must set aside their personal experiences before putting pen to paper.  Don’t they know what it’s like to take a duff video back to the store where you bought it (‘works perfectly on our machine, mate’)?  Have they never suffered agonies of indecision in a card shop, where none of them are just right for the intended recipient and you’ve no option but to choose one from the meagre range that’s available?  Don’t these people appreciate what it’s like standing in the ‘express’ ten-items-or-less line when the person ahead of you has eleven items in their basket?  Yes, of course I count them!, though we badly need some kind of official guidelines on the multi-pack problem (i.e. does a four-pack of yoghurt count as one item or four?)  Naturally, it’s one, and only one, when it’s in my basket and four, or more, in everyone else’s. 

Especially yours.

Fortunately, a few intellectual intrepids have been prepared to speak out about the iniquities, profanities and obscenities we are forced to endure in our, er, cathedrals of consumption.  In the main, however, these are journalists, cultural commentators and creative writers rather than consumer cogitators, shopping philosophers manqué and how-much-is-that-doggie-in-the-window? researchers, who have patently never raised a freshly-baked baguette in anger.   Such a state of affairs should perhaps not surprise us, since the prominent postmodern philosopher, Richard Rorty, maintains that the most profound philosophical insights emanate not from the gleaming spires, sylvan groves and, increasingly, third world sweat-shop conditions of our leaning towers of learning.⁶ They are found, rather, in comic books, television programmes, plays, poems and, above all, the novel.

In this respect, of course, Rorty is not alone. A long line of leading intellectuals -- Benjamin, Bloch, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud, Kant, to name but a few -- has rejected Plato’s rejection of poetry and equivalent creative works as debased orders of discourse.  On the contrary, they contend that poets, playwrights and creative writers of whatever stripe are endowed with privileged insight into the human condition.  Quite a few poets and novelists have come to the same conclusion -- surprise, surprise -- though some might consider this an unconscionable act of self-aggrandisement.  And that would never do. 

You’ll be pleased to hear, however, that I’m not going to go into all that poetic premonition, anticipatory illumination, inarticulate speech of the heart stuff right now. After all, I’ve written books on the subject and, well, you can only recycle your material so much (not that that’s ever stopped me in the past).⁷  As postmodernists, admittedly, we are duty bound to milk the academic system for all it’s worth, spit the lactose back in their scholarly faces and declare the ensuing mess a priceless proto-Duchampean work of art.  Nevertheless, in the belief that textbooks are an under-rated product placement vehicle and the hope that you might decide to acquire my other works of – pardon my French --scholarship, I’ve decided not to develop the poetic champions compose theme on this occasion.  For God’s sake take the hint!  Do I have to include an order form and ISBN number?  Buy Brown’s books!  I’d mention the titles, you understand, but modesty forbids.  That, plus the admittedly outside possibility that you might foolishly acquire them all in the hope of finding the ones I’m specifically referring to.  Hey, no harm in trying!

Anyway, to get back to what I was saying before that short commercial break and word from your local sponsor, some of the most insightful comments on the abomination that is shopping, the egregiousness of exchange, the rotten side of retailing, the accursed share of consumption – call it what you will -- come from journalists, essayists, short story tellers and creative writers.⁸

Consider Johnson’s description of the supermarket experience:

The mind boggling fecundity of capitalism has its drawbacks.  There is almost too much choice.  I used to feel this even more strongly in Washington, especially when I visited the up-market hyper-deli in Georgestown, which has 150 different kinds of bread and over 200 cheeses.  It is not surprising that Russians, on their first visit, can’t believe it’s real.  When, some time back, a Soviet pilot absconded to the West with a new-model Mig, and was in due course taken round a Californian supermarket, he thought it had all been put on specially for him, like a Potemkin village.  The idea that it was everyday stuff for 250 million Americans was impossible for him to grasp. 

Supermarkets sometimes astonish me too.  I only discovered last week that the magic eye at the check-out can differentiate between orange, green and red peppers, and mark them up accordingly.  But, as always, the real surprises are the human ones.  This gaunt, hungry-looking fellow, just checking out in front of me, what has he got in his trolley?  Why, nothing but six Harpic Red-Tops, three dozen tins of Kleenoff Drain-Opener, a large yule-log cake and 12 Mars bars.  He’s a loner too, or perhaps a visiting member of the Addams family.  Has he carved up his wife, and is he about to dispose of the pieces, followed by a rich celebratory feast?  The girl at the desk tots up the bizarre contents of his argosy without batting one false eyelash, and he pays with a £50-note.  Outside, it is freezing, and an ancient, crumbling figure, wearing a crushed top-hat and straight out of Gissing, is playing ‘White Christmas’ on a hurdy-gurdy.  The Kleenoff man gives him a pound coin before loading his purchases into a smart new Volvo.  A supermarket makes me feel like a character from Pirandello, unable to distinguish between illusion and fact: does the real world lie within the glittering shop, or on the cold pavement outside?  And will there be spiritual supermarkets in Heaven?⁹

Or what about the gustatory pleasure of dining in that Hamburger Hades popularly known as Planet Hollywood:

The genius of Planet Hollywood is that it is a restaurant which replicates the way tracksuit bottoms eat at home.  It gives a new meaning to home cooking.  You can come here and eat couch-potato-style grot whilst gaping at a screen.  Just the way you do at home.  And you don’t even have to button-punch.  Your minimal attention span is addressed by the commensurate brevity of the clips.  Planet Hollywood is ill named.  Planet MTV would be apter.  Planet Trash would be aptest.  One wonders if the whole tawdry show is not some elaborate experiment being conducted by a disciple of the loopy behaviourist B.F. Skinner.  The Hollywood it celebrates is not that of Welles or Siodmark or Sirk or Coppola, but that of aesthetic midgets with big budgets.

You fight your way (with no great enthusiasm) past merchandising ‘opportunities’ up a staircase to a world of operatives with clipboards – keen, smiley people who may or may not be victims of EST.  They are frighteningly keen, alarmingly smiley.  Our waiter, or customer chum, or whatever, was called Mike.  He cared.  He really cared about whether we were enjoying the whole experience.  He kept asking.  The pity of it is that he probably did care – he was so hyped up by the Planetary geist that he sought salvation through kiddy approbation.

He offered a trip of the premises.  Politely declined.  Close inspection is not liable to improve them.  Over there is the sci-fi section within zoomorphic megagirders.  Look that way and you’ve got the James Bond room, whose entrance apes the camera shutter device those mostly tiresome films used to use in their titles.  Above us slung from the ceiling was a motorbike apparently used in a film I’d not even seen.  It looked dangerous and I kept thinking that there would be no more pathetic way to die than by being crushed in so dreadful a place.¹⁰

How does this description of designer dweebdom grab you?  It certainly grabbed me.

Thomas Mann said: dress like a bourgeois, think like a revolutionary.  My trouble is that I dress like a dweeb, which tends to have a numbing effect on most of the cerebral cortex.  Fashionwise – or even merely clotheswise – I am dead from the neck down...Some of the soup stains on my ties have soup stains of their own.  Neither of my suits fits.  I take refuge in blazers.  Most of my sweaters are gross.  My shoes pinch.

Whom do I blame for the state of my wardrobe?  Answer: the retailers.  Reason: their cynicism and shortsightedness in employing shop assistants who have sold me, over the years, clothes that neither fit nor suit me. Is stupidity a job requirement for people who work in retailing?

I hate shopping for clothes.  In my experience, shop assistants are either sneeringly superior or too bored or lazy to offer appropriate help or advice.  It has to be dragged out of them.  They think that their role is to flog me duff clothes with minimum expenditure of time or energy.  I blame their bosses. (I blame myself a bit, but not as much as the bosses.)

The only time I was sent packing was by an Austin Reed salesman.  It was winter.  I needed some shoes in a hurry.  The salesman studied my feet, then rolled his eyes despairingly.  He said: ‘You have extremely narrow feet, Sir.  I couldn’t begin to help.  There is nothing at this store – nor at any of our branches – that could fit such narrow feet.  You need specialist advice, Sir.  I expect I could find an address, but it may not be in London.  You may have to make a rail journey.’

He was off his head, of course.  I do not have narrow feet.  He probably had a hangover – just wanted to get rid of me.  But if more sales assistants were more honest more often, I would accumulate fewer unsuitable clothes.  I would not hate shopping.  As a result, I would shop more frequently and spend the money necessary to keep my wardrobe up-to-date. Because they do not train their staff properly, clothes retailers must be cheating themselves of millions in lost turnover.¹¹

Not convinced yet?  Okay, try this one for size.

Why is it that I cannot go shopping in America without wanting either to burst into tears or kill someone?  For all its science, shopping in this country is no longer a fun experience, if it ever was.  A big part of the problem is stores.  They come in three types, all disagreeable.

First, there are stores where you can never find anyone to help you.  Then there are the stores where you don’t want any help, but you are pestered to the brink of madness by a persistent sales assistant, probably working on commission.  Finally, there are stores where, when you ask where anything is, the answer is always ‘Aisle seven’.  I don’t know why but that is what they always tell you.

    ‘Where’s women’s lingerie?’ you ask.

    ‘Aisle seven.’

    ‘And pet food?’

    ‘Aisle seven.’

    ‘And aisle six?’

    ‘Aisle seven.’

….At Toys R Us, my son wanted a Star Troopers Intergalactic Cosmic Death Blaster, or some such piece of plastic mayhem.  We couldn’t find one anywhere, nor could we find anyone to guide us.  The store appeared to be in the sole charge of a 16-year-old boy at the single active checkout till.  He had a queue of about two dozen people, which he was processing very slowly and methodically.

Patient queuing is not one of my advanced social skills, particularly when I am queuing simply to acquire information.  The line moved with painful slowness.  At one point, the young man took 10 minutes to change a till roll, and I nearly killed him then. 

    At last my turn came.  ‘Where’s the Start Troopers Intergalactic Cosmic Death Blasters?’ I said.

    ‘Aisle seven,’ he replied without looking up.

    I stared at the top of his head.  ‘Don’t trifle with me,’ I said.

    He looked up.  ‘Excuse me?’

    ‘You people always say “Aisle seven”.’

    There must have been something in my look because his answer came out as a kind of whimper.  ‘But, mister, it is aisle seven – Toys of Violence and Aggression.’

    ‘It’d better be,’ I said and departed.

    After ninety minutes we found the Death Blasters in aisle two, but when I got back to the till, the young man had gone off duty.

    The Death Blaster is wonderful, by the way.  It fires those rubber-cupped darts that stick to the victim’s forehead – not painful, but certainly startling.  My son was disappointed, of course, that I wouldn’t let him have it, but you see I need it for when I go shopping.¹²

I could, of course, go on but let me draw a line with the incomparable Alan Coren, humorist, television personality and marketing man non pariel.

The Dutchess of York suffers from what she has identified as a serious disease.  An epidemiologist of considerable, albeit amateur, standing, she has concluded, after years of research, that it’s a bit like bulimia, but with more designer labels.  It’s symptoms are unmistakable.  If you catch it, you cannot stop shopping.  You buy anything.  You buy everything.  You go broke.

And even as my heart goes out to her today, my gratitude goes, too.  For in bringing into the open a disease which hitherto had dared not speak its name but which now enters the  medical canon as High Shopping Pressure, she has enabled me, at last, to see that what I had always believed to be some kind of character deficiency in myself was in fact the symptom of a major illness which is clearly the obverse of her own.  Unable to shop, incapable of buying anything, I now realise that what I suffer from is Low Shopping Pressure.

Here I am in Harrods.  I have come to buy ties.  I have ties at home, bought by other people, but they have grown variously wrinkled, frayed or eggy, and I have been urged to buy new ones.  I stand in front of a hundred assorted spots and stripes for half an hour.  I pull some out.  I knot some on my finger.  I take some to the mirror.  Then I put them all back, and think: what I really need is socks. They do not seem very different from the socks I have at home.

After I have picked up a hundred shirts and put them down again, I try on trousers.  I keep coming out of the changing room and staring at legs I do not know.  As I pull my own trousers back on for the last time, my wallet falls out.  I notice how battered it is.  I spend half an hour in the wallet department.  I know it is half an hour because I look at my watch.  It is not much of a watch.  It is less much than my wallet is.

Luckily, the watch department is near by.  It is full of great watches.  After a while, however, they do not seem to tell the time any better than mine.  Perhaps all mine needs is a new strap.  I examine a lot of straps, until it occurs to me that a new strap might make my old watch look even older.  Unlike a gold Dunhill cigarette lighter – provided, of course, that I held it in the hand my old watch wasn’t on the wrist of.

I have always fancied a gold Dunhill cigarette lighter. I now look at so many of them that I lose track of why I always fancied one.  But having driven all the way to Knightsbridge and found a parking space where, thanks to how time flies when you are unable to buy anything, I will now find a £30 ticket, it seems a pity not to get a hat, and brown brogues to go with it; but once it transpires that my illness prevents me from buying the it for them to go with, I find myself walking about in a sequence of silk dressing-gowns which I have always fancied would be just the thing to pull a gold Dunhill out of the pocket of.  But not, all things considered, a tin Zippo.¹³

But Stephen, I hear you interject, surely you’ve missed the most obvious example of all.  No doubt I have, since I’ve never been described as a thorough, systematic or rigorous thinker.  Hell, many even call that last noun into question and, to be brutally honest, you can understand why.  When it comes to intellectual endeavour, I cannot deny that I’m a free-wheelin', dilettantish, pick ’n’ mix, roll with the punches, dip in my thumb and pull out a postmodern plumb kinda guy.  Unprofessional, I know, but when faced with a choice between reading the ‘leading’ academic marketing journals or perusing the Sunday papers and glossy lifestyle magazines, do you really blame me?  Indeed, if I wanted to come over all pretentious about this - not that I do, you realise - I suppose I represent the synecdochial side of marketing scholarship.¹⁴  Basically, it means that I read the merest fraction of what’s available in the journals yet get to draw the most all-encompassing conclusions. 

Pretty nifty, eh?

However, if the thing you think I’ve missed is the so-called ‘trolley rage’ syndrome, I’m afraid you’re very much mistaken, sunshine.  As I was about to say, before being so rudely interrupted, cart-attacks are a wonderful instance of creative writers’ primacy in the shopping futurology stakes, their seemingly uncanny ability to pre-empt the sluggards of scholarship.  A couple of years back, you may recall,  ‘trolley-rage’ was all the rage, in newspaper circles at least.  Granted, this self-explanatory syndrome may have been an artefact of silly season hoopla -- man bites dog, skateboarding duck and Elvis lives stories being in short supply, presumably -- though I very much doubt it.  As someone with considerable personal experience of this invigorating, endorphin enriched, life enhancing condition, I am happy to testify to its exhilarating veracity.  There’s nothing in the world to compare with the sheer ecstasy of ramming a heavily-laden shopping trolley into the heels of an unsuspecting person who’s blocking the aisle (I’m sorry, but the supermarket’s a war zone), especially as you have a ready-made, just-can’t-control-these-bloody-things excuse.  No, that’s not true, there is something better than the old anklepoise lamp and that’s ‘accidentally’ clipping their revolting children, since the sheer weight of our wiry weapon sends them hurtling down the aisle like a bowling ball and into the painstakingly assembled pyramid of baked beans at the far end. 

Strike!

Actually, ‘trolley rage’ is a very serious condition, not one to be laughed at or lightly dismissed.  Differently-abled consumers, the trollically-challenged, have their rights too, you must understand.  As I have elsewhere discussed -- hint, hint -- the causes of this deeply disturbing ailment (mutant strains of which are liable to erupt at the most embarrassing moments, such as a romantic dinner where the wine is corked, the service slow, the food cold and the bastards try to pad the bill) are as yet unknown.¹⁵  Even by journalists.  Hypotheses range from excessive coffee consumption and unnecessarily constrictive underwear to sunspot cycles and the population explosion.  All-round moral turpitude is the real reason, of course, albeit some fanatics actually suggest that it has something to do with the masculinisation of the shopping environment.  But we’ll deal with that one later, if you don’t mind waiting.  You do?  I’ve annoyed you now, have I?  You’re getting all hot under the chapter, the fly-leaf, the back board?  It just keeps getting better and better!  Hey, who needs holograms, hyper-real animatronics or postmodern tableaux vivant when textual frustration is so easily induced? 

Be that at is may, the aversive side of shopping is such an important matter that I undertook a major study of it some years back.  However, I’d prefer not talk about that particular piece of research, since it was conducted in a -- hmmm, how can I put this? -- positivistic vein.  Sorry to have to utter the dreaded P-word in a prudish, prissy, well nigh puritanical text like this, but you know the kind of study I’m referring to: large sample, standard survey instrument, inane questions, uncomprehending respondents, tick box rating scales, bump and grind the data and, hey presto, another meaningless contribution to the hypothesis testing corpse - sorry, corpus - of consumer research. 

Of course, now that I’m a windswept and interesting postmodern troubadour, the meistersinger of marketing, the commedia del l’arte of consumption, I don’t do that kind of work any more.  These days, I sit cogitating in coffee bars, pretending to read the latest incomprehensible cryptogram from the Left Bank, rather than stand in draughty shopping centres, clipboard akimbo, ball-point pens beyond number, show-cards at the ready and ingratiating smile on constant state of alert. 

You’ll not believe this amigos, but, idiot that I am, I used to have this macho- hair-shirted research thang, where I conducted all my own interviews, usually with some assistance from a group of full-time MBA or final-year undergraduate students.  Jeez, I must have interviewed thousands upon thousands of shoppers down the years and almost as many retailers, albeit not through choice.  Frankly, I have found that if you’re not there to keep an eye on student interviewers, they spend most of their time in the shopping centre’s coffee bars - how come it took me years to discover what my students know instinctively? - and you end up with a very distorted sample.  Regardless of the sophistication of your scientifically impeccable sampling procedure, students are physically incapable of interviewing anyone other than attractive members of the opposite sex.  Hence, I used to spend most of my time, in a desperate attempt to redress the balance, interviewing the winos, crazies, psychotics, wrinklies, gargoyles (and that’s just the store managers) that you tend to find in such places. 

Now you know why I don’t do that kind of thing any more. 

Well, that’s not strictly true.  I gave it up for another reason, but not, as you might expect, because of a Pauline conversion on the road to postmodern marketing Damascus.  The real reason I quit face-to-face interviewing was that I couldn’t stand the embarrassment any longer. 

Like many horny-handed incumbents of business schools, I’m inclined to think of myself as a fairly think-skinned marketing researcher.  God knows, you need to be when you’re accosting people in shopping centres and, possibly on account of my manner, mien or dark blue suit, they invariably jump to the disconcerting conclusion that I’m a double-glazing salesman, the recruiting agent for a wacko- new age religious cult, an alien life form, or possibly a combination of all three.  Shoppers can be fairly astute, I’ve found. 

What’s more, I have often been mortified beyond the tolerance limits of most humanoids and felt no lasting sense of shame.  There were the times when I was mistaken for a tailor’s dummy.  (One woman looked directly at me, leapt back in alarm and said to her companion, ‘Goodness, Betty, I thought that dummy was alive!’  Dead from the neck up I think you’ll find, missus.)  There was the time when one of the shoppers I was following - it was an unobtrusive observation exercise - turned out to be a shoplifter!  In retrospect, I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised, since such people are part and parcel of consumer society’s rich tapestry, but it certainly shocked me to see the miscreant filling her shopping bag at Boots’ cosmetics counter! 

In case you’re wondering: no, I didn’t report her to the security guards.  I just stopped her outside and demanded, with menaces, a share of the loot.  Mind you, the indigo eye shadow, non-run mascara and kiss-proof lipstick didn’t do an awful lot for me, not with my colouring, though one has to make the effort in our appearance-fixated times.  Don’t you agree?

However, the incident that made me realise the time had come to stop loitering with research intent was when I approached a young woman who had just completed her shopping trip (very attractive, if I remember rightly, albeit this was simply an outcome of my rigorous sampling procedure - it was, I tell you!).  After switching on my ingratiating smile and artfully cocking a carefully plucked eyebrow, I rattled off my time-worn,  rapport-building, confidence-instilling opening line, ‘Excuse me, madam, I’m from the University of Ulster’ - smirk, smirk - ‘and I’m doing a survey on shopping….’ Before I even had time to finish, she looked me up and down, announced ‘You’re a bit old to be a student, aren’t you?’ and marched straight out of the centre!  Up until that time, I’d always got comments of the ‘What do you plan to do when you finish university, son?’ - even when I was a full professor, although the light’s undeniably bad in that particular shopping complex - and, after my ignominious brush-off, I decided then and there to hang up my clip-board. 

Only joking. 

The actual precipitating factor behind my change of academic heart was the fundamental methodological fact that positivistic research techniques are inherently inadequate.  They not only fail to capture the essence of going shopping but result in reductive findings bereft of epistemological veracity, ontological significance and axiological import.¹⁶ 

(The bitch, the heartless bitch.  I was just looking a bit tired, overworked, too many interviews that day. There isn’t a grey hair on my luxuriously maned, virtually leonine head, let me tell you, or there won’t be once I find my light-fingered friend again.  Grecian,  Grecian 2000, I think they call it. Get hold of some of that denture fixative cream while you’re at it.  Where on earth did I leave my monkey glands?  ’Fraid the old memory’s not what it was.  Don’t talk to me about Viagra, by the way.  I took fourteen of them the other day and only ten worked.)

In such traumatised scholarly circumstances, you’ll appreciate why I never wrote up the findings of that particular research project.  Decrepitude-induced indolence may also have had something to do with it, but that is by the bye.  However, given the nature of the present book and your humble scribe’s entirely self-less preparedness to trawl through the most painful experiences of his consuming past so that you might better comprehend the deeply distressing side of shopper delinquency, I am prepared to say a few halting words about that (best) forgotten questionnaire survey.  The fact that it lets me claim to have been doing this kind of thing long before anyone else thought of it -- even smart-ass journalists -- has nothing whatsoever to do with my present willingness to break silence on this profoundly painful matter.

Since you ask, the survey was a fairly conventional exercise.  Several hundred good men and true were interviewed over a week-long period, from Monday morning to Saturday evening, including three late nights, in a medium-sized shopping centre on the outskirts of Belfast.  There were lots and lots of women interviewees as well - those that would talk to us - and, since the refusal rate was quite low overall (the cruel, myopic, tasteless cow, who wasn’t that good-looking anyway and had seen better days, let me tell you…), the sample can be deemed representative of the population of shopping centre users.  True, the 18-24 year-old category of  respondents was ever so slightly over-represented, as were the homeless and institutionalised, but compared to the student samples that most other consumer researchers rely upon, I think we got a fairly reasonable cross-section of ‘real’ shoppers. 

While we’re on the subject, let me just say that there are far, far too many published papers predicated on student-only samples.  I mean, these people have virtually no meaningful experience as consumers.  Many of them are living away from home for the first time and their mothers bought virtually everything for them before they came up to university.  Researchers who rely on student samples are charlatans. They must be ejected from the hallowed halls of the marketing academy.  Forthwith.  Forcibly, if need be.

Sorry about that moment of scholarly candour, but we really have to stamp out this kind of behaviour.  Some, of course, might say that the same problem arises when you employ students as interviewers, since they have an uncanny ability - possibly some sort of post-pubescent sonar - to select other students as interviewees.  But I can give you my solemn assurance that nothing of the kind occurred during the project I’m about to describe, if you’d just stop interrupting me. 

Anyway, to return to my point, the survey instrument itself was very carefully assembled and pre-tested in minute detail.  The rating scales were cobbled together from the rating scales that other researchers have cobbled together from other researchers’ cobbled together rating scales and, indeed, the questionnaire was pilot-tested on, oh, all of three or four people - registered blind and deaf, if memory serves - before being foisted upon 850 shopping stalwarts. The completed forms were scrupulously coded, without any arbitrary post-hoc decisions concerning incomplete or illegible responses.   The ratings made by the principal coding clerk, yours truly, were punctiliously corroborated by my fastidious RAs, who know what side their bread’s buttered on, and a couple of cerebral cronies for whom I wrote blank member checks in the past.  The resultant data were diligently distorted, bent, twisted, turned, churned, manipulated, massaged, scoured, ransacked and generally trawled through, in line with standard statistical practice, until we managed to come up with something that helped identify our initial hypotheses. You know, the ones we intended to report as having stimulated the study in the first place.

So, what did we discover?  (What do you mean create?  The facts were just lying there waiting to be picked up.  We had nothing whatsoever to do with their construction.) 

Ah, Lordy, Lordy, Lordy, how can one possibly put such positivistic profundities into mere words?  Well, you may find this hard to believe, but it turns out that lots of people don’t like shopping very much.  Fifty-eight per cent to be precise, of whom 72% dislike it a lot, especially men and those who are in a hurry.  Now there’s a new wrinkle for you; busy people dislike shopping more than those with time on their hands.  Hold the front page, keep away from the windows and nobody leave the room, I say.  Yet another breakthrough for modern marketing science.  You read it here first. 

What’s more, when it comes to the specific things they dislike - is there no limit to the subtle, filigreed, rapier-like sophistication of this research instrument? - it transpires that our shopaphobes don’t like standing in line, unhelpful shop assistants, out-of-stock situations, the choice of goods and stores’ tendency to reorganise their layout without warning.  In fact, no less than 18% of them said, without prompting, those three magic words, ‘I hate shopping’!

Interestingly - yes, something unusual did come out of this imaginative exercise in cutting-edge marketing scholarship - it appears that there are some very seriously disturbed people who actually like shopping.  I’m not kidding.  It’s true.  Shocking, but true.  I have scientific proof.  The sociologists were right, for once.  Approximately 32% of our sample, the weaker sex in the main, actually derive some sort of perverse satisfaction from going shopping.  There are even some men (well, they call themselves men, but I have my doubts) who claim to enjoy the consuming experience. Yes, you heard correctly, they really love shopping.  It’s a frightening thought, I agree, but as a fine, upstanding, scrupulously scrupulous marketing researcher, who is duty bound to report his results irrespective of personal interests, preferences or affiliations, I simply cannot tell a lie -- unless I can get away with it of course.

Clearly, we could dismiss these manifestly errant findings as some sort of rogue outcome of our particular study.  But, as previously described, the empirical work was very carefully conducted to the highest standards of research excellence.  Sure, some may say that the results represent a bizarre form of false consciousness that our friends of the sociological persuasion keep going on about.  This can’t be the case, however, because the questionnaire actually dealt with this very issue. ‘Do you suffer from false consciousness?’, it asked, and 99.9% of respondents reported in the negative.  The only positive response came from a dipsomaniac who must have misheard the question and assumed it was ‘unconsciousness’.  What’s more, the back up, double-check, belt and braces, split-run, hold-out sample question, ‘Are you now or have you ever been a consumerist?’, was again denied by 99.9% of the sample.  As before, the sole exception was the dipso., who claimed his name was McCarthy and insisted on spilling the beans on the rest of his family.

Although I have previously commented on the problem of McCarthyism in the marketing academy - spilling the Ps, some call it - I’m afraid we have no alternative but to accept our findings as valid.  Some people like shopping.  They really like shopping.  They like being in shops, they like buying and having things, they like spending money, they like seeing what’s new, they like meeting other people, they even like talking to shop assistants! 

I’m sure you agree, this is aberrant behaviour of the most reprehensible kind, which must be extirpated as a matter of urgency, certainly before it spreads any further.  Surely there must be some pharmaceutical regime, or homeopathic medicine, that can help these poor, misguided, stricken souls? And, if not, I’m afraid we have no alternative but to resort to good old-fashioned remedies like thumb screws, nipple clamps, lobotomisation or, in extremis, trepanation should all other measures prove ineffective. 

Hell, I’d offer to do it myself - I have this left-handed chisel that I once picked up in a DIY store - and I’ve often felt like using it on the shopping troglodytes that surround me, especially those people in motor accessories outlets who seem to know what they’re doing and speak in an incomprehensible argot consisting of expressions like ‘shocks’, ‘gaskets’, ‘carbs’, ‘valves’, ‘manifolds’ and ‘differentials’.  Some of us are still trying to work out the difference between near-side and off-side, you fuckers.

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