Lost in the Supermarket

‘I’m all lost in the Supermarket, I can no longer shop happily.

I came in here for a special offer, guaranteed personality’

(Strummer & Jones, 1979)

In Britain (and most of the Western World), you really are less of a person if you can’t spend conspicuously. One’s value as a citizen seems to be indexed-linked to spending power.

Overpriced tat that
makes you a better person

That point has been driven home forcibly to the Deptford Croppy this year.  Back in full-time education since September, earning power in the Croppy household has necessarily taken a 50% nosedive and if it wasn’t for the relentless industry of Mrs Croppy, we’d be well and truly sunk. Ask any household which has lost an income during the current depression and it will be a similar story.

Most won’t starve and should ultimately prevail (inchallah) but there is something deeper at play here; a force that can’t be overcome by mere belt-tightening. In a society which values consumption as an adjunct of personality, the inability to partake is corrosive in the extreme.

Over the past three decades, society in general (and Western society in particular) has become extremely fetishistic and individuals have consequently become almost wholly reliant on products to give expression to their personalities.  In this model of society, a sudden reduction in income is no longer merely a matter of struggling for the basics of life; it is also a major crisis of identity. 

People have been encouraged increasingly to view their identity almost solely in terms of objects, brands and logos that promise to give expression to what they innocently believe is their instrinsic uniqueness.  (“My flash car, my designer clothes, my musical tastes and chi-chi accessories will tell you much more about me than three hours of conversation ever would....”)

Thick and thin:
marketer's wet dream

Somehow, we have reached the point where it's acceptable to view people as  less valid if they cannot give expression to their personality through the judicious display of the right brands and products. Large sections of British society for example, look to branding phenomena like the Peckhams (excuse me, Beckhams) as aspirational role models.

With all due respect (ie. none), these people and their ilk are paragons of superficiality who exist in a moral and intellectual vacuum. And that, we’re guessing is the whole point from a marketing perspective; that emotionally stunted blankness is the perfect canvas for a raft of billboard ads, selling a plucked, preened and airbrushed lifestyle that few of us will ever match. Tools of marketing? Certainly. Role models for society...really?

More than half of English men in a newspaper survey conducted a couple of years ago said that they would happily let their partners sleep with David Peckham (sic) but only if they could watch. We're guessing the remainder probably wanted to sleep with the overrated ball-chaser themselves. We don’t know about you but that to us is another trivial but telling illustration of a culture that really has lost its way.

Consumerism has become an all-pervasive tyranny. To even question this state of affairs is to be considered a crank. The established media has colluded in this to a disgraceful extent. Recently, during the Christmas shopping orgy, lobby groups for the retail sector (with the connivance of the commercial media) presented the sales not just as an opportunity to pick up bargains but also as something akin to a patriotic duty.

By their ethically suspect logic, it’s not the fault of corrupt bankers or ideologically bankrupt politicians that the economy is tanking; it’s the consumers’ fault (that’s you and me folks). If the stakeholders of UK plc really loved their company (excuse me, country) they would be out running up debts in January to pay for shoddy and extortionately overpriced tat. And that way, Britain can hold on to a financial services industry that apparently awarded £7bn in bonuses this year to what are, in real terms, nothing more than over-groomed compulsive gamblers.

It was even insinuated by the greasy till fumblers that London Underground workers, who threatened to strike on St Stephen’s Day (Boxing Day to my non-Irish Bredrin) in defence of their hard-earned rights, were somehow enemies of the state who were preventing shoppers reaching the Oxford Street sales to do their duty. This of course gave the Tories another opportunity to wonder loudly whether union power should be further curtailed.

The Clash were right, we really are lost in the supermarket...