Stefanie Preissner
The real price of that two-euro T-shirt
“It’s easy enough for Anna Wintour to avoid shopping in high street shops”
Is it just me, or is everyone else sick of standing in queues while people return stuff ? I was in a shopping centre last week and had to navigate a serpentine queue that had grown too big to be contained by the store.
The people wound around clothing rails and mannequins, and spilled out on to the main thoroughfare of the mall. The strangest thing about this consumer conga line was that a huge percentage of them were actually already holding bags branded with the shop’s logo, betraying them as ‘returners’. Apparently prodigal sons of shopping are people who come in store to return goods bought online, and are now a majority of the footfall of some shops. Did they all just get awful Christmas presents with thoughtful gift receipts attached? Do we just buy online without much consideration, because we can simply return in-store with no hassle?
It seems like bringing things back is the new shopping. Online shopping has boomed in the last few years. Retailers realised they needed to make the process of getting the product to the buyer as easy as possible. It was the only way people would adapt to this new way of shopping. Free or cheap shipping has enticed millions of consumers to switch from buying in store to buying online. The problem took a while to become evident, but now it’s in glaring technicolor in every shop and parcel drop-off location across the country. You often see shoppers being put off by overly long queues made up by people who aren’t buying anything — they’re getting refunds.
Once, a woman in front of me was returning a pair of heeled boots. “Is there anything wrong with this item?” the store manager asked.
“No, they’re just too small.”
Another woman saw the shoes and interrupted.
“Are they a size 10?”
“Yeah, but they’re too small for me.”
She turned to the saleswoman. “Can I buy them? You’re all out of 10s in the shop.”
The manager explained that they were not allowed to put returned online stock back on the shop floor. It had to go back to the warehouse. There was a short intense battle of wills between the women, but policy won out.
I did some research after leaving the store.
When we return the things we buy online, many of those things end up in landfill. It’s highly probable that those heeled boots have ended up in a grotesque pile in some dump. If something is torn or damaged, that’s fair enough, but increasingly, unused and perfectly intact items are ending up in landfill piles.
Many companies simply don’t have the staff, infrastructure or technology in place to handle the cost of returns. The cost of getting a pair of €16 heeled boots back into a saleable condition just isn’t worth it. It would cost too much to re-tie the laces and put them in a fresh box, so instead they sell them to discount websites or send them to landfill.
Anna Wintour recently called out fast fashion and tried to encourage people to be mindful of making sustainable sartorial choices. The
Devil Wears Prada inspiration has asked people to focus on quality and craft, and buy things you can wear over and over and give to your grandkids. That’s all well and good, but her coat cost three months’ wages — it’ll be a wintery day in hell before any of my friends or I could shop like Wintour. Surely there’s an in between?
I’d say it’s easy enough for Anna to avoid shopping in high street shops for her basic tees and vests!
I hate the idea that things I buy and return might become global garbage, but is it my responsibility to not buy the thing, or is it on the shop to make more eco-conscious policies? As long as €2 T-shirts exist, people will buy them. People can’t be blamed for getting excited by a bargain, but maybe if we had a greater awareness of where our discarded, damaged, or returned items were going, we might approach fashion in a different way.
Having millionaire fashion icons preaching about investing in clothing isn’t going to help, I think. It’s just... well, a bit rich, like.
The multiple footprints of the serpentine queue in the centre were obvious, but the carbon footprint of that buy-and-return attitude to shopping was less clear to me. Swearing off shopping is unrealistic, but there are things I can do to try to avoid contributing to that pile of perfectly good stock messing up our planet. I’m certainly going to try to only buy things I am sure I will keep from now on.