Industry | 2008.12.26
Andrew Martin: Your country needs you ... to buy some underpants
When Viv Nicholson won the football pools, her vow to "spend, spend, spend" had a certain transgressive power, and her story of rags to riches and back became a morality tale of the times. But that was the 60s, when the remnants of a puritanical mindset dictated that you didn\'t boast about spending money; you didn\'t eat for the sake of eating or shop for the sake of shopping. If Nicholson had won her money this year, by contrast, she might have been a poster girl for Gordon Brown\'s campaign to get us out of the house and into the shops.
It is apparently our patriotic duty to go shopping. We neurotically monitor the retailers\' latest financial results and our identification with the fortunes of the big stores seems absolute. Toys really are us; John Lewis is a close personal friend; and we were all guilt-tripped about our neglect of Woolies. I envisage posters in our city centres featuring the face, and pointing finger, of Sir Stuart Rose, and carrying the legend: Marks & Spencer Needs You ... To buy some underpants.
But perhaps we are beginning to think that we\'ve seen enough of the interior of Sir Stuart\'s premises for a while. We certainly don\'t seem to have taken the hint from Alistair Darling\'s VAT cut, and I suspect that Britain is waking up to an absurdity I identified when I was about six years old.
The logical aim of shopping is surely the removal of the need to go shopping, at least for a while, after the need or desire is met. Shopping as a way of life that is now the British way of life carries with it the admission that the itch can never be scratched; that the enterprise is doomed from the start.
I don\'t claim any moral or intellectual superiority for those of us who minimise our shopping (well, perhaps I do a little). We just don\'t happen to care for the lighting in shops, or the music. At this time of year, it always seems to be some munchkin-like crew singing about how happy they are, which contrasts poignantly with the faces of the actual shoppers. On the supermarket bookshelves, the omnipresence of the matronly Jamie Oliver, or the mysterious, eternally leotarded Rosemary Conley and her Complete Hip and Thigh Diet is perplexing to the point of a headache. We always pick the queue featuring the man who wants to pay for his apple with a credit card, or the woman who only begins searching for her purse some time after being told the amount due - and then with a look of affront, as though where she came from all groceries were supplied free of charge.
We shopping refuseniks have traditionally, if not exclusively, been men. In researching her book of 1974, Housewife, Anne Oakley discovered that, while many working men were willing to help their wives with the shopping, most refused to be seen carrying a shopping bag. They didn\'t want to be identified as shoppers. It\'s an essentially passive pursuit, after all, and one transacted in contemptibly mealy-mouthed terms. The shop assistant\'s "Can I help you?" means "Give me your money or get out", and the shopper\'s "Thank you", at the completion of the purchase, is equally loaded with resentment, according to the degree to which he or she has been ripped off.
We who would like shopping to be more marginal in our society would prefer to see a factory in place of the out-of-town superstore. A factory, with its fierce customisations and mysterious leakages of steam, has a mystique and glamour compared to a shop. It also offers the prospect of more interesting and highly skilled work, and a better chance of advancement. Having seen where an economy that is overreliant on services has led us, the government, in the form of Lord Mandelson, has started to talk up British manufacturing, or what\'s left of it. Perhaps his rueful awareness that New Labour has allowed a million and a half jobs to be lost from the sector lies behind his apparent willingness to bail out Jaguar Land Rover, whereas Woolies staff are deemed as disposable as many of the goods they sold. This is a tacit admission of what has long been denied: there is an irreducible core of manufacturing that must be retained.
Micheal Gallagher, a clinical psychologist with a background in labour studies, has spoken of the need for a study of the effect on young men of working in the services as opposed to industry - "especially given the high rates of suicide and depression among them ... Large-scale manufacturing brought many forms of certainty now lost. You were given identity by your place of work, the associated trade union, brass band, sports club, social club and so on".
It\'s not very surprising that the government has identified a problem of low aspirations among white working-class boys in northern cities. Their current fate, if they find employment at all, is likely to be a job in services, and years of asking strangers that craven yet resentful question: "Can I help you?"
• Andrew Martin is the author of How to Get Things Really Flat: A Man\'s Guide to Ironing, Dusting and Other Household Arts
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]/20/andrew-martin-men-shopping
