Shopping until dropping, Kate?

from DARLING MAGAZINE SW LONDON SPRING 2022

Change negative thought patterns with Emma Parr

Le click, c’est chic!

By Kate Greenhalgh

I’m buying too much stuff online. Blame lockdown, but the habit seems to have stuck. I used to turn my nose up at ‘mail order’ - my granny was a fiend for buying thermal underwear from catalogues - but lockdown starved me badly of retail therapy, and I got click-baited.

There are two mysteries about buying online: how, exactly, do you end up in that website-jungle in the first place, and why, if it isn’t quite right, do you always think ‘meh, never mind, too much hassle to return, work with it’? I decided to follow myself for a few weeks, being mindful of what was making me do it. What was the gateway? Print adverts? Word of mouth? Pop-ups? (Not TV. I look at my phone during TV ads, don’t you? And certainly not ‘influencers’ - I’m not allowed on any social media, because my children say I would embarrass myself, by which they mean embarrass them.) I used to work in an advertising agency, back when we employed ladies in bikinis to promote unreliable cars by lying uncomfortably across their bonnets, so I consider myself to be a fairly sophisticated consumer.

To start with print media. Apart from lovely magazines such as Darling, I am also a big fan of bus sides. I always seem to like whatever is advertised on bus sides. And outdoor billboards. I think if something is honest enough to be worth the trouble of getting big sheets of paper printed about it and put in place by people on ladders with glue brushes, then fair do’s - buy it. As for word of mouth - everybody I know has good taste, so again, fair do’s, buy it. This leaves pop-ups, as are irritating the bejeezus out of me on my screen as I type. I just bought that blasted handbag - why are you blitzing me with pictures of it? And now a beautiful French woman in a jumper in Paris....oh wait on...hullo...she looks so cool...click, click, click.

This is not to say shopping in actual shops is over of course. I’m not necessarily a ‘bellwether consumer’. I found myself in a real live shop changing-room only last week, having a nice chat through the curtain with a helpful person bringing me French jumpers to try on. And thank goodness I did. They looked awful on me. The homely British bosom does not sit well in Parisian knitwear - when will I learn? But online I might have bought them! And stuffed them in a drawer for some marvellous time in the future when I manage to look more French. n