Here’s a funny thing. The less we go to the shops, the more we shop. We buy more stuff than ever, now that we can do so without leaving the sofa. We have bypassed the bus ride into town, stepped back from the revolving doors and escalators, silenced the tinkle of muzak, skipped the exchange of smiles and niceties with sales assistants, forgotten what it feels like to journey home from the chase with shopping bags tucked next to tired legs. Instead, we can spend our hard-earned cash with the frictionless brush of an index finger, and collect our spoils from the doormat a few days later.
This, surely, is the worst of both worlds. Let us imagine for a moment a sliding-doors scenario, in which writing shopping trips out of the story had reduced our appetite for stuff. If, thanks to technological advances, we bought what we needed, and only what we needed. Imagine if the technology had been wired so that we could click on and buy a black mascara and a pair of navy socks, or whatever, and leave it at that, without the siren call of a pile of fluffy jumpers or a charming display of splatterware mugs leading us into temptation. Imagine if online shopping had been an Ozempic for shopaholics, blunting our greed, reconnecting us with our willpower. It would still have been bad for bricks-and-mortar shopkeepers, it would still have left ugly grey-shuttered gaps to blight our high streets like rotten teeth – but it would have been in the service of a healthier planet.
London’s Big Topshop at Oxford Circus, where teenage girls once screamed like Swifties as Kate Moss strutted and posed in the shop window like a festival headliner, is still boarded up, beached like a vast blue whale two and a half years after Ikea announced it had bought the site. Half a mile away on upmarket New Bond Street, the 130-year-old department store Fenwick, long beloved of Londoners who wanted something fancier than John Lewis but less flashy than Harrods, recently closed its doors for the last time. The sad ghosts of Gap and Paperchase haunt high streets up and down the country.
Returns are increasing, as the rise of digital shopping has deskilled us as consumers, conned by good lighting into buying cheap fabrics
And still, we shop and shop and shop online. “Buy less, buy better” is a fashionable catchphrase, but a dig into consumer behaviour reveals that we don’t tend to practise what we preach. A person in the UK now buys, on average, 28 pieces of clothing a year. Research shows that even those shoppers who say that they agree with the statement that well-made products last longer and are therefore better value for money will plump, when push comes to shove, for the cheaper option. An atmosphere of global insecurity has foreshortened our perspectives. The future seems too uncertain to picture the clothes you will be wearing or the sofa you will be sitting on a few years down the line, so you buy the cheap version and kick long-term thinking into the long grass.