Mother's little shoppers

SHOPPING:TWENTY YEARS ago the idea of Irish school children listing "shopping" as one of their hobbies would have been unthinkable. But if the anecdotal evidence of teacher acquaintances is to be believed, this is exactly what's happening.

From the early days of the boom, well into the middle years of the recession, shopping has been seen by many Irish people, old and young, as just another way to pass the time. For classical economists, and consumer journalists, wedded to the notion that shopping is a functional necessity, the idea that some might find the process pleasurable is alien and weird.

For these experts, shopping is a war of attrition between retailer and consumer, and willingly putting yourself on the battle-field when you have no particular consumer needs to fulfil is just asking for trouble. Consumer advice typically encourages targeted, list-based forays into the field of conflict. But this isn’t how everyone else sees it.

“When you read about the Dundrum Town Centre or the Blanchardstown Town Centre they don’t talk about ‘shopping’, they talk about ‘the experience’,” says Prof Mary Corcoran, a sociology lecturer at NUI Maynooth. “They offer stimuli, spectacle and the opportunity to while away a considerable period of time. You flow through the shopping mall, meet friends, go to a movie, have a coffee, dine out, get your nails polished. The whole concept of consumption has diversified and expanded away from the idea of meeting material needs and simply putting the clothes on your back. For many people it’s a much wider social activity and form of expression.”

Kirstie McDermott, who co-runs the beauty website Beaut.ie, has spent several years monitoring the comments of the enchanted.

“There are definitely plenty of young women out there who would consider shopping to be a hobby,” she says. Though she wouldn’t see it that way she believes that viewing it purely as a means to an end is a bit reductive.

“It really is a social activity for a lot of people. It’s dressed up as ‘shopping’, but it’s really more about getting out of the house, away from the kids and into town for an afternoon to meet friends for lunch, pop into Arnotts and Brown Thomas before heading home.”

Some academics see nothing wrong with this and argue that shopping as a hobby is simply a by-product of the capitalist world in which we live. “I think there is a bit of moral panic around things like this,” says Olivia Freeman, a lecturer in consumer behaviour at the College of Business in DIT.

“I think the fact that people say they shop as a hobby is just a reflection of the fact that as a society we have become more consumer-oriented. I certainly wouldn’t be prepared to say that it’s automatically a bad thing.

“If shopping was only for the bare necessities, we wouldn’t be in a capitalist society at all. People shop for both social and functional reasons. I definitely think that consumers these days are savvier [than in the past]. I would be of the view that they’re not passive subjects, exploited by market forces, but that they are using consumption for their own ends, although those ends could be about expressing identity and forging relationships, rather than being straightforwardly practical.”

The problem is, the adoption of this social activity is increasingly starting in childhood.

"They start at a young age, shopping a little bit with their mothers," says Sarah McDonnell, editor of The Glossmagazine.

“Then maybe they’re allowed off the leash a bit to go to one shop alone with a friend, and by the time they’re 13 or 14 they’re marauding around a mall with their own pocket money. Before you know it, the shopping malls are filled with these phalanxes of mini-women of 14 just walking along five abreast. They definitely see shopping as a hobby.”

Debbie Ging, a lecturer in the School of Communications at DCU, thinks this is a worrying form of indoctrination.

“I find it really hard to understand how shopping can be fun or satisfying compared with climbing trees, building bike ramps or listening to music,” she says. “When we were children and teenagers, we were never told that girls are obsessive shoppers, we weren’t given plastic shopping trolleys to play with and Imelda Marcos was the only woman we ever heard of with a shoe-collection fetish. Shopping for us was a nightmare – for me it still is – that dragged us away from freedom and adventure. Now, we seem to have hordes of little Carrie Bradshaws in training. They will be experts in the art of brand obsession by the time they graduate from Penneys and Claire’s to the more upmarket labels that will promise them empowerment and liberation through anti-wrinkle cream and handbags for the rest of their adult lives.”

McDonnell is a bit less worried. “While I wouldn’t like to think that shopping was replacing other more mind-broadening activities, I don’t think it’s automatically negative,” she says.

“Those kids you see wandering through the malls, they’re not necessarily breaking the bank. I recently listened to my 12 year-old niece telling her mum and dad how much she’d spent in Dundrum. She’d split something with some friends at Eddie Rocket’s, so she was quids in for 28 cent on a milk-shake or something there, and then she bought some other tiny thing. You could argue that it’s teaching them to budget,” she laughs. “Those poor people working at Eddie Rocket’s.” And this is something their older relatives are also learning to do. These days, you’re more likely to hear hobby-shoppers outdoing one another with stories of bargains than irresponsible profligacy.

“They’re not bragging about their expensive shoes, they’re bragging about the brilliant foundation they got for five quid,” says McDermott.

“But that type of hobby-shopping is really the difference between snacking and proper eating. It’s like you’re wandering around the shops grazing. And if you’re doing that in Brown Thomas, you’re going to get into a lot more financial trouble than if you’re doing it in Penneys. So people are still going ‘shopping’ but they’re adapting.”

Indeed, almost everyone Pricewatch spoke to felt that the idea of shopping as a leisure activity was outliving Ireland’s boom years. Is this a bad thing?

“From one perspective it’s clearly a pretty superficial form of self-identity to understand or view yourself purely through branding or shopping and it’s more admirable in some ways to resist it,” says Corcoran.

“But at the same time you can’t be completely dismissive of the things that people like to do. If someone likes to do some window shopping, followed by a latte in the Dundrum Town Centre, I don’t think an analyst can accuse them of having some sort of false consciousness. It would be wrong to think of shopping purely as a utilitarian thing,” she says.

She believes that in times of austerity people become “more discerning about what they spend money on, but there’s always going to be another side of consumption that’s more about enchantment, where you go out and see the most fabulous dress in the world and you just have to have it”.