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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”.
Page:
There have been no replies to this thread yet.
(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”.
Page: