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(this is a long one)
I went away a few weeks ago with my lady to Lymington, down near Bournemouth.
Now, maybe it’s me being an old fogey but I loved it.
And why did I love it?
Because it was a real functioning village/town, and you don’t see those that often anymore. There was a family butchers (run by a family, not butchering families I think…), a tailor, a local supermarket etc etc.
Not once did I come across a McDonalds or HMV or Currys or any other number of faceless chain-stores with exactly the same layout wherever in the world you may be.
And I thought that was fantastic, and I hope it stays that way for a long time yet.
Where I live is just like any other “new” town you’ll see all over the country. What used to be the town centre has now become a concrete graveyard. There are a few stores still struggling, but it’s exactly the same High St that you’ll find anywhere in this country (and most others).
There’s a WH Smith, a Boots, a Marks and Spencer, an HMV/Virgin Megastore (where you cant actually find the stuff you want because it’s not called Hearsay), there are a number of fast-food chains and “Poundworld” stores, where “everything is a pound”. Including the hourly wage if appearances are anything to go by.
What used to be the focal point of a town has now become a place that kids in hoodies go to skateboard or old people go to chat and await the inevitable.
There doesn’t appear to be any life left in towns, instead it’s all moved out to these horrible industrial parks on the outskirts of towns.
It would appear that people prefer to walk across windswept car-parks and wander around megalithic box stores staffed by clueless (in the nicest possible terms) staff that don’t care or have any interest in what they actually sell.
It’s just a faceless, impersonal experience designed for maximum consumerism with as little personal contact as possible. Why spend 20 mins with a customer establishing a decent environment when you can take 30 seconds, barely look them in the eye and process them like cattle through the checkouts.
Why? Why do people want these identikit places with exactly the same 14 products in, the same layout, the same muzak piped in through the air vents etc etc?
What’s wrong with individualism? I think it’s a sad thing that the entire world drinks Starbucks coffee, wears Gap clothing (and Gap for Kids), eats generic burgers and pizza, shops in the exact same stores the world over.
I promise you, if you kidnapped someone in France, bound and gagged them and smuggled them to Wisconsin and dumped them in a mall there, they would have no idea they were even in a different country.
It’s called “Globalisation” apparently, and consumers like this.
It removes the strain from living, takes the worry out of decisions, affords you the time to no longer concern yourself with locating something you might actually want and instead frees your time up to get that Swedish Bookcase they advertised in The Times last week.
Even supermarkets do it, same store layout the world over.
And they now do “cornerstores”, mini-versions of the massive supermarkets to capture that “village” feeling.
That “village feeling” that was stamped out by precisely the sorts of ideas by companies that now pretend that they care about little towns.
I loved being in Lymington.
No chain stores, there was a street market and small, privately owned stores that were thriving.
People were out walking at night, going to the pubs (real pubs, not “Family Themed Entertainment Centre Pubs”), using the restaurants and all the other little things I hadn’t seen in an age.
Companies are aware that people are reacting more and more against turning the world into a giant shopping centre.
Starbucks now have little bookstores attached to the sides of their larger stores, and customers are invited to “be a part of the experience”.
All the things people used to do, go for a drink and sit with a book in a café, all these things have been forced out of business and are now being resold to us as “lifestyle accessories”. They’ve taken what we used to do as a matter of course and have now made it fashionable and “hip” to be alternative.
The idea of anti-corporate living has been branded and repackaged.
And then I came back to the town I live in. I needed to use the bank in the high street for something and that was when I noticed the utter desolation and scarcity of people walking about.
Why?
Why do people like the idea of piling down to these industrial parks at the weekend and lowing about the massive aisles purchasing faceless goods sold by people that couldn’t care less about you?
It’s not fun, it may be economical but it’s slowly killing the idea of England being a “green and pleasant land”.
It may be more convenient for you, but only if what you want fits in with what businesses deem “convenient”.
Do me a favour, next time you visit a shopping centre?
Count how many Sports stores there are with Nike, Adidas etc.
And then try and find a bookstore. I don’t mean “Bargain Books” where you can get Jamie Oliver’s new book, but I mean a proper bookstore with different sections and real books you’ve never even heard of.
That’s what I find wrong about this mass-market idea of stores now.
I don’t shop in GAP, I don’t buy t-shirts with logos on.
I like to buy books, but I cant because it’s not “economically viable” to have a store with specialist appeal apparently (according to Lakeside Customer Service Management).
Excuse me, books are not “economically viable”? When did that happen? Since when was a book a specialist item? Why is it that I can go down to these monuments to bland consumerism and get 13 different flavours of rich-roast coffee in a nice branded cup but I have to go online to order a biography I want to read?
That’s where we’re headed more and more and it scares me. Apparently we don’t want books, we don’t want stores that remember our names and what we like, we don’t want to actually enjoy going out to get our products.
Apparently we want the same stores, we all want to wear the same clothing and advertise the same companies by displaying their logos on our chests (I am not a billboard, you want me to advertise your company then you bloody pay me), we all want to drink low-fat mocha lattes.
Well I don’t, but I don’t have much of a choice it seems now.
Instead, we’re turning into what Bill Hicks called “The 3rd Mall from The Sun”.
I went away a few weeks ago with my lady to Lymington, down near Bournemouth.
Now, maybe it’s me being an old fogey but I loved it.
And why did I love it?
Because it was a real functioning village/town, and you don’t see those that often anymore. There was a family butchers (run by a family, not butchering families I think…), a tailor, a local supermarket etc etc.
Not once did I come across a McDonalds or HMV or Currys or any other number of faceless chain-stores with exactly the same layout wherever in the world you may be.
And I thought that was fantastic, and I hope it stays that way for a long time yet.
Where I live is just like any other “new” town you’ll see all over the country. What used to be the town centre has now become a concrete graveyard. There are a few stores still struggling, but it’s exactly the same High St that you’ll find anywhere in this country (and most others).
There’s a WH Smith, a Boots, a Marks and Spencer, an HMV/Virgin Megastore (where you cant actually find the stuff you want because it’s not called Hearsay), there are a number of fast-food chains and “Poundworld” stores, where “everything is a pound”. Including the hourly wage if appearances are anything to go by.
What used to be the focal point of a town has now become a place that kids in hoodies go to skateboard or old people go to chat and await the inevitable.
There doesn’t appear to be any life left in towns, instead it’s all moved out to these horrible industrial parks on the outskirts of towns.
It would appear that people prefer to walk across windswept car-parks and wander around megalithic box stores staffed by clueless (in the nicest possible terms) staff that don’t care or have any interest in what they actually sell.
It’s just a faceless, impersonal experience designed for maximum consumerism with as little personal contact as possible. Why spend 20 mins with a customer establishing a decent environment when you can take 30 seconds, barely look them in the eye and process them like cattle through the checkouts.
Why? Why do people want these identikit places with exactly the same 14 products in, the same layout, the same muzak piped in through the air vents etc etc?
What’s wrong with individualism? I think it’s a sad thing that the entire world drinks Starbucks coffee, wears Gap clothing (and Gap for Kids), eats generic burgers and pizza, shops in the exact same stores the world over.
I promise you, if you kidnapped someone in France, bound and gagged them and smuggled them to Wisconsin and dumped them in a mall there, they would have no idea they were even in a different country.
It’s called “Globalisation” apparently, and consumers like this.
It removes the strain from living, takes the worry out of decisions, affords you the time to no longer concern yourself with locating something you might actually want and instead frees your time up to get that Swedish Bookcase they advertised in The Times last week.
Even supermarkets do it, same store layout the world over.
And they now do “cornerstores”, mini-versions of the massive supermarkets to capture that “village” feeling.
That “village feeling” that was stamped out by precisely the sorts of ideas by companies that now pretend that they care about little towns.
I loved being in Lymington.
No chain stores, there was a street market and small, privately owned stores that were thriving.
People were out walking at night, going to the pubs (real pubs, not “Family Themed Entertainment Centre Pubs”), using the restaurants and all the other little things I hadn’t seen in an age.
Companies are aware that people are reacting more and more against turning the world into a giant shopping centre.
Starbucks now have little bookstores attached to the sides of their larger stores, and customers are invited to “be a part of the experience”.
All the things people used to do, go for a drink and sit with a book in a café, all these things have been forced out of business and are now being resold to us as “lifestyle accessories”. They’ve taken what we used to do as a matter of course and have now made it fashionable and “hip” to be alternative.
The idea of anti-corporate living has been branded and repackaged.
And then I came back to the town I live in. I needed to use the bank in the high street for something and that was when I noticed the utter desolation and scarcity of people walking about.
Why?
Why do people like the idea of piling down to these industrial parks at the weekend and lowing about the massive aisles purchasing faceless goods sold by people that couldn’t care less about you?
It’s not fun, it may be economical but it’s slowly killing the idea of England being a “green and pleasant land”.
It may be more convenient for you, but only if what you want fits in with what businesses deem “convenient”.
Do me a favour, next time you visit a shopping centre?
Count how many Sports stores there are with Nike, Adidas etc.
And then try and find a bookstore. I don’t mean “Bargain Books” where you can get Jamie Oliver’s new book, but I mean a proper bookstore with different sections and real books you’ve never even heard of.
That’s what I find wrong about this mass-market idea of stores now.
I don’t shop in GAP, I don’t buy t-shirts with logos on.
I like to buy books, but I cant because it’s not “economically viable” to have a store with specialist appeal apparently (according to Lakeside Customer Service Management).
Excuse me, books are not “economically viable”? When did that happen? Since when was a book a specialist item? Why is it that I can go down to these monuments to bland consumerism and get 13 different flavours of rich-roast coffee in a nice branded cup but I have to go online to order a biography I want to read?
That’s where we’re headed more and more and it scares me. Apparently we don’t want books, we don’t want stores that remember our names and what we like, we don’t want to actually enjoy going out to get our products.
Apparently we want the same stores, we all want to wear the same clothing and advertise the same companies by displaying their logos on our chests (I am not a billboard, you want me to advertise your company then you bloody pay me), we all want to drink low-fat mocha lattes.
Well I don’t, but I don’t have much of a choice it seems now.
Instead, we’re turning into what Bill Hicks called “The 3rd Mall from The Sun”.
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If this is the result of globalisation then I pretty much like it. If you don't want to wear clothes with a logo, or go to Starbucks, HMV or whatever then thats great, but don't try telling others that doing so makes them any less of a person.
The image of England being full of quaint little english villages and towns is nice, if it had actually existed anywhere outside of the imagination. Sure, the chain stores didn't exist but the vairetuy of goods also didn't. Even if there were no HMV or Virgin you're local record store would still have Hearsay everywhere, and the chance of import CDs would be pretty much zero. Small stores killed themselves with rubbish customer service (mainly) high prices and zero business sense. I don't care if the store has been going for 50 years, that's no excuse for high pricing. Even today there are plenty of independent stores surviving, and even in the rubbish little place I live in I have no problem getting any book I want. First off, go across to the local discount bookstore, give the guy a rough idea of the title, he punches it into his computer and orders it. Simple. for other stuff like comics I catch a bus into Nottingham.
Globalisation ins't even anything new - its just that a few people have ran out of something to complain about and a 400 year old subject is a good one...and before anyone blames the Americans and their corporations it was the British, with help from others like France and Spain, that started globalisation anyway back in the 16th century.
Fact is, Globalisation means a better life. Buy what you want, quickly, pay less for it, more choice, more employment and more profit all round. I don't really care how pleasant a shop assistant is, I'm not bothered enough to have arant at them. And yes, I'm a part time one too. I trot out the "do you need any stamps for the card....do you need a phonecard" and all the other lines. I don't care, it's just a job. Every four weeks I get paid and go buy DVDs, Games, comics and clothes with logos on. I don't care if a customer finds it all boring because to me its just a job to earn some cash to spend wastefully. End of the day, I just do what the training book says and the managers happy, I'm happy, and we get a bonus at the end of the year.
Besides do you know how easy it is to sell phone cards just by asking people if they want to buy them........ lol :)
The image of England being full of quaint little english villages and towns is nice, if it had actually existed anywhere outside of the imagination. Sure, the chain stores didn't exist but the vairetuy of goods also didn't. Even if there were no HMV or Virgin you're local record store would still have Hearsay everywhere, and the chance of import CDs would be pretty much zero. Small stores killed themselves with rubbish customer service (mainly) high prices and zero business sense. I don't care if the store has been going for 50 years, that's no excuse for high pricing. Even today there are plenty of independent stores surviving, and even in the rubbish little place I live in I have no problem getting any book I want. First off, go across to the local discount bookstore, give the guy a rough idea of the title, he punches it into his computer and orders it. Simple. for other stuff like comics I catch a bus into Nottingham.
Globalisation ins't even anything new - its just that a few people have ran out of something to complain about and a 400 year old subject is a good one...and before anyone blames the Americans and their corporations it was the British, with help from others like France and Spain, that started globalisation anyway back in the 16th century.
Fact is, Globalisation means a better life. Buy what you want, quickly, pay less for it, more choice, more employment and more profit all round. I don't really care how pleasant a shop assistant is, I'm not bothered enough to have arant at them. And yes, I'm a part time one too. I trot out the "do you need any stamps for the card....do you need a phonecard" and all the other lines. I don't care, it's just a job. Every four weeks I get paid and go buy DVDs, Games, comics and clothes with logos on. I don't care if a customer finds it all boring because to me its just a job to earn some cash to spend wastefully. End of the day, I just do what the training book says and the managers happy, I'm happy, and we get a bonus at the end of the year.
Besides do you know how easy it is to sell phone cards just by asking people if they want to buy them........ lol :)
Goatboy wrote:
> Do whatever you want to with it mate, fine with me.
Cheers, much appriciated.
> Do whatever you want to with it mate, fine with me.
Cheers, much appriciated.
Do whatever you want to with it mate, fine with me.
Erm...Goatboy, this might sound like a bit of a strange request, but could I put this into my Geography coursework?
It kind of fits in with what I need to say in my 'Data Interpretation' - I have two cities, one of which is big and faceless as you have described, the other is a bit like the Lymington you described. The problem is, you need to have data and reaserch for everything you write about - and I dont think I'd get away with putting a rant by myself in between divided bar graphs and funning scattergraphs.
However, if it was from someone else, then it would look much better.
You would get all credit, naturally.
It kind of fits in with what I need to say in my 'Data Interpretation' - I have two cities, one of which is big and faceless as you have described, the other is a bit like the Lymington you described. The problem is, you need to have data and reaserch for everything you write about - and I dont think I'd get away with putting a rant by myself in between divided bar graphs and funning scattergraphs.
However, if it was from someone else, then it would look much better.
You would get all credit, naturally.
Tetchy wrote:
It's
> got a Co-op, and a primary school, no village college though. Littleport's its
> name.
Ah, not my little village then. Not far away at all though!
And I beg to differ, my village IS the inbred capital of the Fens! Thank God I wasn't born here :-)
I do liek where I live, it's actually quite a large village, and all it's got is 2 newsagents, a co-op, a butchers a village college and a primary school. It's not busy but it's not deserted and it's only a 10 minuete car journey away from Cambridge. Fantastic.
It's
> got a Co-op, and a primary school, no village college though. Littleport's its
> name.
Ah, not my little village then. Not far away at all though!
And I beg to differ, my village IS the inbred capital of the Fens! Thank God I wasn't born here :-)
I do liek where I live, it's actually quite a large village, and all it's got is 2 newsagents, a co-op, a butchers a village college and a primary school. It's not busy but it's not deserted and it's only a 10 minuete car journey away from Cambridge. Fantastic.
Tetchy wrote:
> I guess I get the best of both worlds. I live in a real inbred town in the Fens
> (although I wasn't born here).It has a couple of newsagents, a butchers and that
> is about it.
The thing is it bores the hell out of me. So I end up running
> to any hive of commercialisation I can find. Just somewhere where everybody
> doesn't know everyone else. Which was cute at first, but grating now.
I love
> where i live dont get me wrong, it will never become commercialised (the village
> elders won't allow it). But just 4 miles away is the Cathederal town of Ely.
That village doesn't happen to have a village college, a primary school, a co-op and two churches, does it?
> I guess I get the best of both worlds. I live in a real inbred town in the Fens
> (although I wasn't born here).It has a couple of newsagents, a butchers and that
> is about it.
The thing is it bores the hell out of me. So I end up running
> to any hive of commercialisation I can find. Just somewhere where everybody
> doesn't know everyone else. Which was cute at first, but grating now.
I love
> where i live dont get me wrong, it will never become commercialised (the village
> elders won't allow it). But just 4 miles away is the Cathederal town of Ely.
That village doesn't happen to have a village college, a primary school, a co-op and two churches, does it?
The end of your post made me think of the bit at the end of Casino, when they've torn down the old Casino's.
"The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like Disneyland.
And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior's college money on the poker slots.
In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it's like checkin' into an airport. And if you order room service, you're lucky if you get it by Thursday."
It's the impersonal touch. When I was little I remember going shopping with my dad on saturdays while my mum was at work. Instead of going to the supermarket and getting it all in one place, we'd wander round loads of shops.
One shop for the fruit and veg, another shop for the meat, another for the newspaper etc etc. Every shop we went into the person working had a chat with all the customers, no matter how busy.
I always asked him why we couldn't go to the supermarket, and saving walking round all over the place. And he said he preferred the personal touch. I didn't get what he meant then, but I do now.
What you're saying is true.
However, it is starting to come to an end. The Government has deemed that no more Out Of Town (OOT) shopping centres will be given planning permission.
We did all this stuff for A-level geography.
Councils are, apparently, being instructed to redirect their money to redevelop town centres, instead of opening up another indutrial park on the outskirts of towns.
Quite how long it'll be before we start to notice this, I don't know...
"The town will never be the same. After the Tangiers, the big corporations took it all over. Today it looks like Disneyland.
And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop the house payments and Junior's college money on the poker slots.
In the old days, dealers knew your name, what you drank, what you played. Today, it's like checkin' into an airport. And if you order room service, you're lucky if you get it by Thursday."
It's the impersonal touch. When I was little I remember going shopping with my dad on saturdays while my mum was at work. Instead of going to the supermarket and getting it all in one place, we'd wander round loads of shops.
One shop for the fruit and veg, another shop for the meat, another for the newspaper etc etc. Every shop we went into the person working had a chat with all the customers, no matter how busy.
I always asked him why we couldn't go to the supermarket, and saving walking round all over the place. And he said he preferred the personal touch. I didn't get what he meant then, but I do now.
What you're saying is true.
However, it is starting to come to an end. The Government has deemed that no more Out Of Town (OOT) shopping centres will be given planning permission.
We did all this stuff for A-level geography.
Councils are, apparently, being instructed to redirect their money to redevelop town centres, instead of opening up another indutrial park on the outskirts of towns.
Quite how long it'll be before we start to notice this, I don't know...
Bennett's bookshop in Ely closed a year or two ago.
Now if you want a book, you'd better hope it's in WH Smiths, or you'll have to travel to Cambridge to get it, or order it.
Thank God for the internet.
Ely is odd though, they've tried to stop chain stores coming in for years, trying to keep it like an old town, but it just doesn't work. There are dozens of empty shop units, because indepenents can't afford the rent, and the chains that can, struggle to get in. There's no McDonalds, but there's a USA Chicken.
As a result we have half a dozen charity shops. Hell, last week I spotted a charity eatery, 'Lunch-Aid'.
Then they do decide to let some chain stores in, but it's Peacock's and Wilkinsons rather than quality shops, making Ely just like any other feeble market town, and you have to go to the cities for the bigger shops....
Ely doesn't work as an old style town, which is a shame, as it's attempts to make it so have turned it into a right dive.
There's a sundial in the pedestrianized square, where the market sometimes is, but I don't understand it. It has no spike, or anything to cast a shadow, there's just a bunch of Roman numerals, coloured like the man holes, dotted around the square, in a circle.
I'll tell you where we did go that was nice though, Lynmouth and Lynton, somewhere in North Devon. I saw driving in the dark, it was 9 or so, over the moor, when we suddenly see all of these lights from a little town. There's a river running through it too, and it was just a beautiful sight. We spent the night there, and had a meal in the pub. A pub that wasn't a chain pub, and didn't have a kids menu. (We didn't have kids at the time).
We spent the whole of the next day there, going into the museum, as the towns had previously been flooded, and a cable car between Lynmouth and Lynton. That was a really nice place, with personality too.
Now if you want a book, you'd better hope it's in WH Smiths, or you'll have to travel to Cambridge to get it, or order it.
Thank God for the internet.
Ely is odd though, they've tried to stop chain stores coming in for years, trying to keep it like an old town, but it just doesn't work. There are dozens of empty shop units, because indepenents can't afford the rent, and the chains that can, struggle to get in. There's no McDonalds, but there's a USA Chicken.
As a result we have half a dozen charity shops. Hell, last week I spotted a charity eatery, 'Lunch-Aid'.
Then they do decide to let some chain stores in, but it's Peacock's and Wilkinsons rather than quality shops, making Ely just like any other feeble market town, and you have to go to the cities for the bigger shops....
Ely doesn't work as an old style town, which is a shame, as it's attempts to make it so have turned it into a right dive.
There's a sundial in the pedestrianized square, where the market sometimes is, but I don't understand it. It has no spike, or anything to cast a shadow, there's just a bunch of Roman numerals, coloured like the man holes, dotted around the square, in a circle.
I'll tell you where we did go that was nice though, Lynmouth and Lynton, somewhere in North Devon. I saw driving in the dark, it was 9 or so, over the moor, when we suddenly see all of these lights from a little town. There's a river running through it too, and it was just a beautiful sight. We spent the night there, and had a meal in the pub. A pub that wasn't a chain pub, and didn't have a kids menu. (We didn't have kids at the time).
We spent the whole of the next day there, going into the museum, as the towns had previously been flooded, and a cable car between Lynmouth and Lynton. That was a really nice place, with personality too.
I guess I get the best of both worlds. I live in a real inbred town in the Fens (although I wasn't born here).It has a couple of newsagents, a butchers and that is about it.
The thing is it bores the hell out of me. So I end up running to any hive of commercialisation I can find. Just somewhere where everybody doesn't know everyone else. Which was cute at first, but grating now.
I love where i live dont get me wrong, it will never become commercialised (the village elders won't allow it). But just 4 miles away is the Cathederal town of Ely. Even that now has a 'W.H.Smiths' and a 'Dorothy Perkins' and I end up going there for a little (and i stress the word little) entertainment.
But as soon as it gets a 'Gap' I'm out of there.
The thing is it bores the hell out of me. So I end up running to any hive of commercialisation I can find. Just somewhere where everybody doesn't know everyone else. Which was cute at first, but grating now.
I love where i live dont get me wrong, it will never become commercialised (the village elders won't allow it). But just 4 miles away is the Cathederal town of Ely. Even that now has a 'W.H.Smiths' and a 'Dorothy Perkins' and I end up going there for a little (and i stress the word little) entertainment.
But as soon as it gets a 'Gap' I'm out of there.
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