While perusing bins on the John Lewis website, having heard great things about the Brabantia 60-litre, I noticed my stress levels rise – and it wasn’t just because the lid-up height meant the bin wouldn’t fit in my new cabinet. It was because for my whole shopping session there had been a dribble of information about how many other customers had put the items I was looking at in their basket in the last 24 hours, how many had bought them and how fast the stock supply was dwindling. Over on the M&S website, a mattress topper flashed a banner: ‘In demand! Sold 43 times in the last 48 hours’. My heart rate climbed and I felt my wellbeing plummet as a generalised, half-conscious sense of missing out for being too slow – a lifelong fear – crept over me.
They exploit our basest psychological triggers to make us buy fast and in distress
I am fairly sure that browsing bins and mattress toppers online should be the sort of activity that puts you to sleep, not that causes your blood pressure to rise. Instead it has become a fiercely competitive consumer experience, similar to finding cheap flights to Sicily or Greece in peak season.
But why? After all, the deal was clear when EasyJet pioneered the tactic of showing how many other people are looking at a certain flight, how many minutes have passed since someone bought the thing you might want, and how many of those things (seats) are left at a certain price. We were kissing goodbye to pleasantness of experience, running a gamut of psychological and technological stress and confusion and in return we were going to Amsterdam or Dubrovnik for £20.
In the case of posh bins, bedside tables and mattress toppers, which one might have assumed face different stock constraints to limited seats on seasonally-run flights, the decision is more confusing. After all, brands built around appealing to the decorous middle classes through good customer service and reliable quality have no business adopting the tactics of low-cost no-frills airlines.
But it seems that they’ve finally chucked all that aside and made a pact with the devil of e-commerce: they exploit our basest psychological triggers to make us buy fast and in distress, systems on high alert that something we need or want will be snatched from us as once happened in the school playground. We are to be Hunger Games shoppers, cutting down the rest before they cut us down. Goaded thus, we will find shopping with John Lewis or M&S or whoever else horrible and stressful, but we’ll do it. After all, we can’t help ourselves.
Perhaps there is a silver lining. Could this new landscape of dog-eats-dog, cage-fighting online shopping be preparing us for the near future? Productivity in Britain is stagnant for a variety of reasons, including laziness, entitlement, pervasive strikes, poor economic policy, a taste for protest politics over work, and an apparent general ennui. We are not dynamic, we are not creating wealth, our industrial and manufacturing output is feeble and uncompetitive, and the emotional temperature is generally one of narcissistic, phone-twiddling catatonia. Since Brexit, and thanks to a creaking IT culture, supply chains haven’t worked properly. Things took a further downward turn with Covid as people got used to sacking off work. Now our pharmacies struggle to stock basic medicines while even Waitrose often lacks bare necessities and high street shops are woefully understaffed or randomly closed.
There is also the constant threat of terror and war – neither of which we seem capable of averting. We can’t even summon the manpower to properly attack Houthi targets after months of aggression from those murderous, rocket-happy brigands on our vessels, to say nothing of a useless immigration policy that lets in any old person, including those who might cause us harm. To add to our woes, the economic policy of our likely next PM, Keir Starmer, doesn’t seem to exist, and if does eventually take shape, it seems unlikely to get us back into a Thatcherite period of growth, innovation and vigour. It’ll be (more) strikes and sick days all the year long.
So if the economy breaks down completely, there will be a general scrum for goods, a bit like in communist countries before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Learning to jump fast on what one wants, to respond skilfully, ruthlessly and quickly to competitive pressure in the marketplace under threat of losing out may be just the kind of training we need for what is to come. Or maybe my heart rate has just been unnecessarily spiked by a popular M&S mattress topper.
A slightly less apocalyptic view is that, having softened ourselves into lives of relative ease, with few fights for survival left, retailers are only re-introducing the kind of excitement and competition for resources that we used to have on the savannah and the battlefield.Indeed some might say that if bin shopping at John Lewis is the new battlefield or hunt then things have, at least by some metrics, improved.
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