Ending an Age of Consumption

The age of consumption as a leisure pursuit and retail as therapy has come to an end, says a recovering shopping addict, as banks no longer have the wherewithal to encourage people to spend money that they do not possess. But in the period's very excess lies a remedy to the sin of prodigality
Retail therapy used to be a journalistic catchphrase to suggest that shopping was one of those harmless activities - think Absolutely Fabulous or Sex and the City - that made you feel better about life in general. You don't find it in quite such common currency now. Ditto those equally familiar little adjectives in the style sections of the fashion journals: "must-have", "must-buy", which were intended to give an air of whimsical necessity to anything that a magazine was trying to promote, from £800 statement handbags to gold nail varnish.
Well, that's not where we're at right now. And we have this on high authority. The Bank of England, back in November, observed in its review of the previous half year that "discretionary spending was seen to be shrinking, with retailers reporting that fewer consumers were treating shopping as a leisure activity, reflected in reductions in both impulse spending and visitor numbers at shopping centres". In other words, we are finding other ways of spending our time than in trailing around shopping malls and chain stores. Actually, when I say "we" I really mean women; men and children shop too but not in quite the driven way that women do.
The roll call of casualties as the credit crunch takes its toll on one shopping chain after another just gets longer. Some of them mean nothing at all to me - I have never entered a Land of Leather outlet - but Waterford Wedgwood is another matter. Ditto Woolworths. There's Viyella, a brand whose very name conjures up an entire class of British womanhood, there's Whittard of Chelsea, there's Marks & Spencer, which has shed more than 1,200 jobs, there's even cost-cutting at Waterstone's - thereby giving the lie to the notion that the book trade is immune to recession. Every day, another casualty.
Obviously, as financial journalists like to point out, there are winners as well as losers in the downturn, but the losers are, in general, cheaper than the winners: the second-hand book trade, discount supermarkets, the Ford Fiesta. And while vast shopping malls like London's Westfield are hauling in shoppers in droves, just like they would have done in the days before the Flood, the punters are not necessarily queuing to buy things at full price. One interesting result of the price-cutting across the retail sector that started in the weeks before Christmas is that many people simply assume they are entitled to a discount. For shops to be holding near-perpetual sales is not an indicator of retail health. The British Retail Consortium has said bleakly that the downturn in purchasing is the worst in 20 years, although online shopping has correspondingly increased.
For a less obvious symptom of the fact that shopping is going out of fashion, consider this: the high-end online fashion retailer Net-A-Porter is sending out customers' orders in unmarked, discreet, brown paper packaging. "You've been shopping; we won't tell" runs the advert, which is as far away as you can get from Joanna Lumley flaunting her shopping bags in AbFab. If we do shop, we're not so inclined to brag about it. During my own little sales foray to the AbFab country of London's Sloane Street, I noticed it isn't the natives who are shopping, it's the Chinese.
I can, as it happens, present myself as Exhibit A for this phenomenon of a culture that is edging away from shopping - at least, offline - as a leisure pursuit. I have been, ever since I had pocket money to spend, a vocational shopper, an addict to the biochemical uplift that the shopper gets when acquisitiveness is satisfied. But, like the paradox of lust, acquisitiveness is never satisfied for long: desire, once satisfied, begets more desire. In short, I shopped whether or not I could afford it, and kept shopping, in good times and in bad. Indeed, I like to think that I gave a modest fillip to the GDP of any economy I visited. Heaven knows how many jobs I helped maintain in congenial employment sectors, from hand-painted china to artisan food producers. And the upshot, dear reader, is that I find myself in possession of about half a dozen credit cards which cost, at the present usurious APR, rather more to maintain than I pay in rent. As I now know, I was entirely representative of the spirit of the age of affluence that ended last year in that I regarded the limitations of my income as no barrier to buying more things.
Before we question why we don't shop like we used to, it's worth asking why we took it up as a leisure pursuit in the first place. And that, I would say, can only be understood in terms of the liberalisation of credit. In other words, the development which meant that you were encouraged to buy things that you didn't have the money to pay for.
To see the full scale of the social change between the generation that shopped its way into the credit crunch and the ones that went before, let me tell you about a hillock under the carpet in the sitting room at home. I discovered this little bump after my father died and my mother remarked that she thought he might have kept some money under the carpet. And so it turned out. Under the table, there was a little mound of notes and coins, in sterling and Irish money. This was my father's little hoard, his funds for bad times. He had little faith in banks - his father had kept his reserves in his socks - and how right he has turned out to be.
But the point was that my father, so very far from ever getting into debt, used to have modest cash reserves. He was the most generous of men; he just didn't spend money he didn't have. My mother, too, has never been in debt. She used to have an account with the Bluebell clothes shop in our town, where she would pay a small sum towards whatever she wanted to buy on a weekly basis until she finally bought it.
It was the reverse principle of the credit card. Fast forward to the late Eighties and Nineties, when the expansion of credit meant that financial institutions conspired to throw money at whoever might be obliging enough to take it. The demutualisation of the building societies, turning them from provident institutions that screened applicants for loans, to the profligate lenders who didn't ask embarrassing questions, symbolised a larger trend. So did the introduction of interesting new instruments, like store cards, which were assiduously promoted by shop assistants with every purchase.
Without the expansion in credit, the full flowering of shopping as a leisure pursuit simply could not have happened. There have always been spendthrifts - there are any number of Victorian novels where the heroine tries to hide her milliner's bills from her husband - but never has such a large amount of credit been put so freely at our disposal. And now we are paying for it - I can add my mite to Britain's trillion pounds' worth of personal debt.
Plainly, with the credit crunch, the shopping culture has lost its financial underpinning. The morality of encouraging people to spend money they do not possess is now being subjected to withering retrospective. From the consumer's point of view, shopping is very much less fun when you have existing debts to service and less certainty - unless you are employed in the public sector - about your future income, indeed your job.
I should like to add that the hellish boredom of traipsing round identical shopping malls has finally begun to get to us, but the success of Europe's largest indoor shopping mall, the Westfield in west London, suggests otherwise. More likely, as the market research company Synovate observed, shopping has become for some people "more of a frustration, where their eyes and hearts alight upon goods that have become unaffordable to them".
The age of excessive consumption has brought its own remedy. St Thomas Aquinas treated prodigality - which includes irrational shopping - as a sin, a little less than covetousness. "In affection to riches the miser superabounds, loving them to excess: while the prodigal falls short, not taking due care of them. In exterior behaviour, it belongs to the prodigal to exceed in giving, but to fail in keeping or acquiring." But sensibly, he observes that "the prodigal is easy to cure, as well by the approach of old age, which is contrary to prodigality, as by his easily sinking into poverty through his many useless expenses". How right he was.