Apart from the thrill of buying cheap goods, the fantasy retail world online provides company to the person who shops there, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
IT CAME as no surprise to many of us to learn, via Saturday's Irish Times, that the Irish are the tenth biggest online shoppers in the world. Only tenth? We would demand a recount only we're too busy with online shopping gossip, waiting for the postman and being contacted, sometimes on a daily basis, by the firms concerned. That blooming Johnnie Boden, always calling you by name.
Forget Japanese knotweed. This is the fastest growing phenomenon within Irish society. Until last Saturday, when the cover was ever so slightly blown in The Irish Times Magazine,its activities were covert. The network thrives on a web of assumed identities, false addresses and shamefully addictive behaviour. If you have ever wondered how the Irish female survived the ferocity of our most recent winter, then wonder no more.
"You can get an address in America and they'll send all the stuff to it," said a source close to The Irish Times,just after she had amalgamated her J Crew and Banana Republic purchases into one parcel. "Oh God, I forgot to tell them to write the word 'gift' on the outside."
You can try to tell this respectable and law-abiding woman that she is going to wake up one morning to find a small man with a large megaphone down in the car park of her apartment, and the FBI pounding at her front door. You can try but you will fail.
It’s not that she doesn’t realise that her modus operandi is similar to that of a terrorist coming out of a 20-year slumber, it’s just that in her ideology, a pair of J Crew trousers makes it all worthwhile.
Some of the finest minds in the country – not my mind, obviously – are fixed on the web and have a permanent search typed into eBay and Outnet for anything by Dries Van Noten and Ossie Clark (no luck with Ossie, unfortunately; only the small sizes left).
Bravissimo packages are whirring back and forth over the Irish Sea like Cheltenham debts. Bravissimo – yes, it is a great name – do bras and some outer garments for ladies with larger busts. The company’s cartons have its name boldly written on the outside, and some customers are getting a bit paranoid about what they imagine to be knowing looks from postal staff. “Bravissimo should make a sticker which says ‘It’s only a cardigan’” said one addict.
Littlewoods have a delivery depot in Portarlington.
Welcome to the world of the other mail order brides – married to the web. These are not the girls who have to hook up with ugly blokes to support their entire extended families in a developing country.
No, no, no, the new mail order brides don’t have time to worry about stuff like that. They might order some clothes for the kids. They might get their mum an outfit for a wedding. But most of the time it’s just shop, shop, shop, browse, browse, browse , return, return, return – for themselves.
Because the web never closes and so the new mail order bride is on a perpetual shopping honeymoon, without ever having to reveal her thighs.
Everybody knows that shopping in the real world is no fun for most people over 40, who are the wrong shape, the wrong age or the wrong social tribe for the high street.
In Ireland our retail options in the real world – or at least the world of the main street and the shopping centre – are pretty limited, and damned expensive.
On the other hand, nothing can stale the infinite variety of shopping on the net, both at the top and bottom ends of the market. If you’re too broke to shop in Ireland or too rich to be seen shopping in Ireland, in either case the net is undoubtedly for you. Just as it is for you if you are a fashionable young person, or a bloke who wants to order cowboy boots from Texas.
This is quite apart from the pornographic thrill of online shopping – oh, the joy of pressing send – which has so far been unexplored within the Irish novel, probably because it is so private. Online shopping can leave you flooded with endorphins whilst sitting at your kitchen table in your discounted Juicy Couture tracksuit. (Yes, I have interviewed a lot of people for this article. That’s the kind of journalist I am: a conscientious researcher, first and foremost.)
But way before the moment of purchase there is a lot of pleasure to be had internet shopping, just cruising a fantasy retail world.
Of course all bricks and mortar shops are a fantasy, as anyone who had ever taken their tea break behind a wall of cashmere goods will tell you.
Backstage in a shop is a pretty shoddy experience and frequently infested with something even more frightening than the compulsive shopper. But the fantasy retail world online provides a strange accessory to the person who shops there – company.
The customer review, remarkably frank and detailed and included on many of the most popular sites, provides a sense of community and also of consumer power.
Online shopping is both an online game, as thrilling in its way as Grand Theft Auto, and a private way to consume, away from the neighbours. No wonder we love it so much.