shop till (sic) you drop
Regular readers of my rantings will know that I don’t do shopping and that I hold in very low regard those who see it as something akin to a national pastime. Shopping is a chore not a leisure activity. Many, not content with an overdose of pre-Christmas frenzied retail therapy, leave their homes in the still of night to get their shopping fix in the new year sales. Now, I can fully understand people wanting the one-off items slashed to a highly enticing rate, usually the big ‘once in a lifetime’ things like a fridge or a sofa, but the urge to acquire huge quantities of cheap tat that no-one has wanted all year baffles me. If you don’t need it, it’s not a bargain.
Furthermore, no amount of Cameron’s hectoring about me doing my bit to kick-start the economy is going to guilt trip me into putting my hand in my pocket. You and your pals got us in this mess so put your own hand into your personal £30m pocket (and that’s not counting Sammy’s lorded contribution) to get us out of it, just don’t expect help from me anytime soon.
Not that he needs it, he’s getting all his advice from yet another darling diva, retail guru and shopping tsar Mary Portas. I’m even getting angry typing her name and self appointed titles. Grudgingly, several of her suggestions to reinvigorate our ailing high streets, are entirely laudable though ultimately gain her the title of ‘master of the bleedin’ obvious’. She wants local authorities to charge lower business rates to new shops, to bring in one-off retail tax breaks, offer free parking and enforce more stringent planning laws for out of town centres and malls. Sadly, much of this is counter to current tory policy concerning the proposed relaxation of planning, continued cost cutting and a further move back to a free market ‘supply and demand’ driven economy.
The final nail in the high street coffin has to be t’internet. Online shopping is the real game-changer here. While visiting mega-malls is a risible leisure pastime for many, clicks rather than bricks have truly delivered the killer punch – shopping has indeed entered a new age and our national treasure ‘Queen of Shops’ is trying to breathe life back into a corpse. When was last time you bought something, or felt you needed to buy something, from a Woolworths, Peacocks, La Senza or a Millets? Nope, me neither.
