Virus fear vanishes in rush to the sales
WELL, that didn’t last long.The virus will change us, they said. We will become more spiritual, less materialistic, they claimed. We will understand that money cannot buy you happiness and that there are more important things in life! And with that they opened the high street and you saw a rush to the shops that made the Charge of the Light Brigade look like a kindergarten outing. Not only are the shops open, but the sales are on and Britain is reverting to type: it would trample on its own grandmother in a rush to get to a half-price pair of skinny jeans. Less materialistic? Oxford Street in London looked much as Egypt must have done after the plague of locusts. There wasn’t anything left. Not that I’m objecting: shopping is what we British do. The Germans go to concerts and the French drink wine while the Italians and the Spanish spend their afternoons in siestas. Us? It’s charging up and down the supermarket aisles, grimly determined to Buy One, Get One Free, while at the same time using up those vouchers we’ve been hoarding in the endless weeks and months of lockdown.
No matter that the stuff we’re buying is neither needed nor wanted. We’ve got a bargain, which is all that counts. Our credit cards – because an awful lot of it does go on credit! – have been withering on the vine. Now we can go out and buy 12
T-shirts for under a fiver. How did we even exist while the shops were shut?
Social distancing? Are you nutski? How can the fear of contracting a virus compare with the joy of conquest now that the designer outlet park Bicester Village is opening again? Blow Covid-19: that discounted Burberry handbag is mine, mine, mine, a far more satisfying conquest than ever a big cat was in the dark days of hunting on safari.
Some people are demanding the village close because, ahem, the crowds seem to be a little too close to one another for comfort, but we’ve had three months of not being able to rudely shove each other aside in the race for the perfect 49-inch TV and that’s despite the fact we’ve already got three identical ones at home. And you can never have too many pairs of designer trainers. You know it makes sense: a few months ago we were panic buying loo paper.
Now it’s handbags. Have you seen what the markdown is in the post-virus sales?
We are a nation of shopkeepers
and consumers. It’s in the British psyche and denied our inalienable right to run up humungous credit card bills for months now, it’s no surprise the high streets have turned into a battleground. All that pent-up longing for a new set of luggage, despite the fact that no one is going anywhere, is coming to the fore.
The best things in life are free but the second best are extremely expensive, as Coco Chanel said, quoted here last week.
And frankly, we’ve all had enough of the best things.