When did shopping become a pastime? I have no idea, but I do
know that these days a trip to the shops, especially the out of town mall, has
become an activity far removed from the way in which our parents shopped;
shopping to them was not a leisure pursuit. I remember that as a child we might
go to the shops on a Saturday afternoon, perhaps to buy some essential item
like a mop or a washing up bowl or light bulbs. My Mother might do some window
shopping while my Father and I tagged along tolerantly, he with limited need or
expectation of buying anything, me coveting a toy or a comic book that sadly I
would be denied on the dual grounds that it would "spoil" me and more
pertinently, that my parents could not afford it.
In those far off days of the 1960's, Saturday afternoon was
the only time that this sort of shopping could take place, what with my Father
working Monday to Friday and Saturday morning and with the shops being closed
on Sundays. Browsing around the shops was a different experience when the
stores were lined up along the street and shoppers had to dodge each other, the
weather and the traffic to get from one to the next; undercover shopping
centres changed that. Combine that with the Sunday Trading Act of 1994 that
allowed shops to open on Sundays and a trip to the shops suddenly became
something to do for its own end.
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| South Street Romford in the days when shoppers and vehicles vied for the same space. |
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| Romford today, undercover shopping for all. |
When I talk of shopping I do not necessarily meaning buying,
because although we may see people laden with bags from various stores when we
visit the mall, we also see plenty of people who have bought nothing and will
leave having bought nothing. Malls encourage us to visit them as an experience;
apart from the shops there are restaurants and cinemas and of course ample,
free parking. Open longer, open later, open every day apart from Christmas and
Easter Sunday, the malls have taken over people's lives and while it is
possible to visit and buy nothing, the objective of the malls and the retailers
is to make us spend, spend and spend again. The aim is to make us buy not just
what we need, not even what we want, but the things we did not know we needed,
did not know we wanted. Increasingly the objective is to make us buy more of
the things we already have, to continuously replace and upgrade, either by
making new versions of old products more desirable or by actually making
existing products that we have unattractive, obsolete or useless.
The concept of built in or planned obsolescence was
popularised in the 1950's by American designer Brook Stevens, but can be traced
back to 1924 and General Motors boss Alfred P Sloan Jr, who recognised that the
American motorcar market was reaching saturation point and introduced annual
changes to the company's range, encouraging consumers to buy new each year
rather than when mechanically necessary. Stevens defined planned obsolescence
as "Instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a
little better, a little sooner than is necessary" and nowhere is that
desire generated more than in the mobile phone market and in particular with
the iPhone. Every year Apple introduce a new model. This is preceded by months
of speculation, most of which seems orchestrated by Apple themselves. Then the
product is unveiled and launch date announced, and queues form outside Apple
stores. After days of waiting in all weathers, the man (and it is invariably a
man) at the head of the queue is admitted to the store to buy his coveted
phone, which is only infinitesimally different from the device that he already
owns. Similar hysteria grips large chunks of the male population when Sony or
Microsoft or Nintendo launch a new games console.
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| Alfred Sloan |
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| Shoppers queue at the Apple store, Covent Garden for the launch of the iPhone 4S. |
While men may scorn their womenfolk for buying yet another
pair of jeans or another pair of shoes, for replacing barely worn items with
this season's latest styles, many of them will think nothing of replacing a car
or a phone or a games console or some other gadget because something newer,
shinier, sleeker, but not necessarily better has come along. One reason is the
desire to show off. Having a car with the latest registration plate, owning an
iPhone 6 or an Xbox One confer status or more childishly, the opportunity to
brag. Another reason is more insidious; manufacturers actually make it
necessary for us to buy new by making the old useless.
Take the iPhone. If you had an iPhone 4 you may have wanted
to upgrade the operating system to iOS7, except that if you had an iPhone with
an 8gb memory then there wasn't enough capacity. This was not a problem; who
cared that the icons looked a little different, it didn't matter did it? Except
it did, because your favourite app updated and failed to work anymore because
it needed iOS7, and those other apps that you wanted, well they need iOS7 too.
So what do you do? You upgrade your phone of course.
Microsoft are past masters at making changes apparently for
the sake of change, and of making that state of the art PC or laptop just a
piece of plastic and wires within a few short months, of creating operating
systems that they make redundant by withdrawing support. To give you an
example, we have The Sims installed on our PC and my daughter Sarah has been
playing this quite happily for a number of years when suddenly the game will
not launch and the reason for this is that the launcher requires IE10 or
higher. Try to download IE11 and the operating system on the PC (Vista) is
incompatible with versions of IE higher than IE8[1].
Fortunately the internet reveals a number of cheats or workrounds that allow
The Sims to be launched, although all of this becomes largely irrelevant when
the PC has to be restored to its factory settings.
This is part of the syndrome where change is for the
convenience of the manufacturer, the software vendor or the retailer rather
than the consumer. Take TomTom. They recently emailed me and suggested that I
update my sat-nav's software. Now I have been reluctant to do this since a
previous attempt to do so wiped the device completely and it had to be returned
to the manufacturer for repair, but since there are a number of roads that my
device doesn't recognise (on part of the M2 it asks me to take the third exit
at non-existent roundabouts and spends a lot of time believing me to be in a
field), I thought it was worth the risk. Initially the update seemed to work,
except that a piece of important functionality had been "improved" in
such a way that rendered it if not useless then certainly less convenient. A
few moments surfing the internet and it became apparent that this was a common
issue with TomTom's customers and I was able to download a patch. It would not
surprise me to find that the next time I am foolish enough to plug my sat-nav
into my computer I will learn that a new, compulsory update is not compatible
with my device and that I will therefore be encouraged to buy a new one.
And then there are print cartridges, but frankly I have
neither the time nor the energy for that topic today!
[1] We have IE on our PC through sufferance and the need to
use Citrix through it; for everything else there's Chrome.
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