This is a story about modern consumerism; it is being written inside a mall.
From my vantage point on a wooden bench purposely designed to be
uncomfortable and placed alongside a digital screen pulsing ever-changing
adverts selling other outlets, other products, other ways here to spend,
spend, spend, I can watch shoals of people hurrying in and out of stores
honouring the creed of the turbo-consumer: live to shop.
A young woman rushes by at a semi-trot. On her shoulder is an eco tote bag
bearing the slogan: “All You Need is Love.” But she evidently doesn’t
subscribe to this ideology; she is laden with branded carrier bags — Mango,
Urban Outfitters, New Look. What she really needs, it seems, are more shoes,
skirts, scarves, belts. How often do you go clothes shopping, I ask when I
catch her up. Most lunch breaks and every weekend ideally, she says. Why?
She eyes me dubiously: “Because I love it.”
How did we get here? How did we get to a point where shopping became the
premier leisure activity, where we gladly boarded the work-to-spend
treadmill, the insatiable pursuit of “more”, which resulted in there being,
for example, 121 mobile phones for every 100 people in the UK by 2008? Does
it even matter? Shopping doesn’t kill anyone, it keeps the economy going and
provides one in six jobs. If it makes people happy, why not leave them to it?
Well, that’s just it. Two, frankly gripping, new books argue that
turbo-consumerism — the age of instant gratification and voracious appetite
for “stuff” — cannot make us happy and it never will. Every time we are
seduced into buying one product, another appears that is “new”, “improved”,
better than the one you have.
In his book All Consuming, Neal Lawson, a political commentator and
chairman of the pressure group Compass, describes turbo-consumerism as “the
heroin of human happiness”, reliant on the fact that our needs are never
satisfied. A consumer society can’t allow us to stop shopping and be content
because then the whole system would die. “Instead it has to sell us just
enough to keep us going but never enough that our wants are satisfied,” he
says.
The brief high we feel is compensation for not having a richer, fuller life.
Now that the recession has struck, many can’t even get the hit of
compensation.
Geoffrey Miller, a professor at the University of New Mexico, uses
evolutionary psychology in his book Spent to conclude that runaway
consumerism “offers little more than narcissism, exhaustion and alienation”.
You may have noticed that many Michael Jackson fans who poured on to the
streets last month to mourn his death immediately bought Jacko T-shirts and
other memorabilia. Their response to grief was to shop. It’s understandable.
For years, worldwide, shops, retail centres, giant malls have been taking
over public spaces creating a mainstream monoculture. The pedestrianisation
of city centres, though largely regarded as pro-citizen, is actually, say
critics, primarily to maximise footfall and shoppers’ “grazing time”. This
retail creep has ensured that increasingly there’s not much else to do but
shop.
As Lawson says: “The more we consume the less space there is to be anything
other than consumers. The space to be citizens and make decisions equally
and collectively about the world around us is diminished.” It may be a free
country, “but we simply have the freedom to shop”, he says. Kings as
consumers, pawns as citizens.
In the Liverpool One shopping “experience”, where I am sitting, a teaser on
the interactive map perhaps signals how far we have let shopping become a
standalone activity. “Liverpool One shops are open until 8pm every weekday,”
it says. “Why not spend a night out shopping?”
It must be said that here, a place teeming with shoppers despite the credit
crunch, and punctuated by Massive Reductions! signs, people
don’t look particularly disempowered or depressed. Purposeful, I suppose,
but also strangely distracted, as if they do not notice the environment
around them, merely the magnetic shop signs.
Recent research conducted by GfK NOP indicated that 54 per cent of people are
cutting back on buying clothes. This may be so, but a lot of people here
today admit to being unable to resist the sales and this is causing their
visits to the shops to increase.
I speak to three women here on a trip from Dublin who say their
clothes-shopping frequency has not decreased during the recession and they
have no intention of it doing so. How do they afford it? “We shop more for
bargains now, as you can see,” they say, indicating their Primark carriers.
“There’s a lot more sales, which is great.”
Don’t you find shopping for its own sake tedious? “It gets us out of the
house,” says Jackie Delaney. “We make a day of it.”
Are we over-catastrophising the consumer phenomenon? I understand the siren
call of TK Maxx and how a £3 top can mend a bad day. But the question is,
why does it?
Miller answers the question of why we buy from the basis of evolutionary
psychology. The human body is a practical tool for reproduction and survival
but it is also the advertising and packaging for our genes and our “fitness
indicators”, he says. When a modern woman buys a new dress or a man a Rolex
watch they are really self-marketing, saying: “Look at me, I’m attractive,
successful, fertile, healthy — mate with me.” It isn’t that we are
materialistic; in a marketing-dominated culture we just don’t know any other
way to do it.
But here’s the thing. Miller argues that much of this is pointless.
Consumerism is a poor means of self-advertising because the vast majority of
people don’t notice or care what you are wearing. “The fundamental
consumerist delusion,” he says, “is that branded goods are the most
effective way of signalling to others our fitness.” Even in a turbo-consumer
world it’s a fallacy that most people care more about the artificial
products displayed by someone than their conversation, wit, affection. The
material goods are more or less worthless; they have value only if the
signals they give out are received and understood by others, eg, that this
is a real Birkin handbag. The thing itself isn’t coveted but its power as a
messenger. “Marketers understand that they are selling the sizzle not the
steak,” Miller says.
By this reckoning we are not materialists at all, we are — what? — signalists?
Miller says marketing actually avoids materialism because it would reduce
products to mere commodities and they need to be so much more — as in public
perceptions of tap and mineral water. Smartwater was advertised with a photo
of a nearly nude Jennifer Aniston and was sold for 870 times the price of
tap. At this historical moment, he says, marketing dominates life on Earth.
It is also a science that keeps shifting its shape. Technology has advanced to
provide in-store ad screens that watch you as you watch them. Small cameras
embedded in the screen read your face, feeding information about your gender
and age range to a data bank, the ads changing accordingly.
Dr Vicki Rabenou, of TruMedia, in Tampa, Florida, one of the leaders in this
technology, says: “Seventy per cent of shopping decisions are made in the
store.” Still, many people might not welcome a supercamera scrutinising
their face.
Back in Liverpool One I should clarify that this is not a covered mall but
what Anna Minton in her new book, Ground Control, calls “effectively
a private city within a city”, a “mall without walls”. It is effectively a
new shopping centre in the heart of the city. A similar scheme is planned
for Stratford City, in East London. Minton argues that this new phenomenon
illustrates how public spaces are increasingly seen as a trading environment
“not for the good of the city . . . but to maximise footfall”.
Sheryl Collins, 26, is returning a dress to a fashion chain. Is there
something wrong with it? “No, I just got it home and changed my mind.” Then
she asks if I’ll use a pseudonym in this piece (which I have) and confides:
“I’ve already worn it, actually, but everyone does it.” Does
what? “You wear it once then take it back for a refund.”
Lawson says that this is a symptom of the “new selfishness” fostered by
turboconsumerism. “For the shopper there are no obligations to others, no
responsibilities, just rights. If the consumer is king, the concept ‘because
I’m worth it’ translates into a world where we are the centre of our own
universe.” He adds: “Personal freedom to shop, to own, to do what you want
is the guiding principle of our age.”
The good news is that this is changing. Miller argues that thousands of young
people are sidestepping consumerism on Facebook and MySpace, realising that
they can make friends and attract mates by blogging, using their
personalities and wit.
Lawson says he believes that more people are gradually rejecting a life of
competitive consumerism. A British Market Research Bureau survey in 2005
suggested that 25 per cent of British adults aged between 30 and 59 had
chosen to downshift during the past ten years, earning about 40 per cent
less than before. Surprisingly, perhaps, downshifters are spread across all
age and social groups, although with a slightly higher proportion of As and
Bs. Among the new breed of downshifters are TIREDs — Thirtysomething
Independent Radical Educated Dropouts.
Great. But what about those of us who can’t afford to do this? How can we jump
off the hamster wheel into what Lawson calls an “alternative hedonism”? One
thing he is sure of is that turbo-consumerism got us into this global
economic mess and it won’t get us out of it. “Though politicians beseech us
to return to our normal shopping patterns what happened before was not
normal,” Lawson says.
He advocates simple, ethical ideas — taking fewer planes, cycling more, buying
less, eating more slowly to help to create a lovelier post-consumer society.
“We are losing the pleasures of time and taste. We feel less alive and more
like plodding robots,” he says. The essence of alternative hedonism resides
in the rediscovery of play and “creates lasting desires rather than eternal
disappointments”.
Miller advocates similar strategies: not buying — finding the same item you
already own in the garage, borrowing from a friend, renting, buying
second-hand, making it yourself, asking to get it as a gift.
He knows that human beings will never stop trying to flaunt their “fitness”,
but gradually they will find better ways of doing it than materialism, such
as by valuing community and neighbourly kindness.
It’s a nice idea. But here in the retail district it still seems a pipe dream.
I speak to Karen and Abi staggering under the weight of their carrier bags.
Will they go home now and put their feet up? “No, we’re taking these bags
home in a taxi,” Abi says. “Then we’re coming back to do another hour before
the shops close.”
All Consuming by Neal Lawson is published by Penguin at £10.99;
Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism by Geoffrey Miller
is published by William Heinemann at £20. To order them at a reduced price
call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
