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Online shopping: it can’t beat the real thing

Kathryn Hughes

The latest research from the United States suggests that consumers are falling out of love with online shopping. The frantic growth of the one-click habit that has transformed the way Americans obtain their daily bread — not to mention their books, clothes, and entertainment too — has stalled and may soon start to decline.

Analysts reckon the same thing will happen in Britain. While the figures still look healthy on paper, with online buying up a whopping 55 per cent on last year, the internet accounts for just 3 per cent of all retail sales, and there are whispers that these consumers are beginning to tire of virtual shopping and long to stand, achey-calved, and slightly sweaty, in a proper old-fashioned queue once more.

What these hot, bothered but strangely fulfilled customers have recognised is that shopping was, and essentially still remains, a social activity. Merely getting hold of the goods and services that you require in the shortest possible time and with the least amount of effort makes nonsense of that favourite phrase “retail therapy,” which implies a kind of glorious glutting not of the items themselves but the process of acquiring them. Ponder the phrase for a few seconds and the image that automatically comes to mind is not that of a woman at home calmly surveying her new purchases, but of one bustling along the street hung about with rustling carrier bags, the contents of which are never actually revealed. It is not the having but the getting that brings that flush of pleasure.

Evidence that we are once again putting the social processes of shopping over and above the mere obtaining of goods comes with reality British TV’s newest and most interesting hit: Mary, Queen of Shops. In this 60-minute forma t, Mary Portas — the woman who turned round the deluxe London department store Harvey Nichols and much more than the sum of its already glamorous parts — goes round the U.K. getting local boutiques to buck their ideas up. What matters to Ms. Portas is not so much the frocks that are, or are not, on offer in any particular place, but the kind of feelings that they generate. Is this a space that communicates excitement and possibility to the shopper, a sense that something new could be about to happen? Or is it one that limits and frustrates or, worse still, simply bores by presenting her with what she already knows?

Face-to-face trading has always been about a great deal more than the mere swapping of goods for currency. At its heart lies exchange in its broadest and richest sense. Along the classic trading routes of the ancient and early modern worlds were trafficked not simply carpets, china, drugs, perfume, prize horses, and boxes of jade, but also ideas, knowledge, belief, and skills. Along the old silk route stretching from China to the Mediterranean came not just luxury and plague but a host of less tangible commodities that had the effect of drawing strangers into dialogue with each other. The art of diplomacy, not to mention the useful habits of empathy and trust, were forged not so much in splendid palaces and staterooms as in bazaars and markets, souks and stalls.

It was shopping as much as suffrage that was responsible for bringing middle-class women into public life in the early years of the past century. Department stores provided the first spaces — apart from church — where unaccompanied respectable women might wander at will. The lavatories and the tea rooms — not to mention the lending libraries that so many department stores also provided — made these places the nearest thing to a safe house plonked down in the wilds of city centres. Popping out to buy a pair of gloves or some tea became a licence to roam streets that otherwise belonged to men, and the kind of women your mother had warned you about.

Online shopping, by contrast, offers no possibility of extending one’s repertoire of desires or behaviour. You go online with a clear idea of what you already want and that is exactly what you get. Instead of being hustled, inspired, pushed or drawn into buying something that you would never have thought of but now can’t live without, you are returned repeatedly to your own deepening rut of expectations. Far from turning the whole world into one glorious and accessible bazaar, online shopping merely petrifies an already dwindling range of options and habits. —

Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

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