ONE OF THE unexpected bonuses of growing older is no longer being intimidated by shop assistants. Ten years ago if a sleek, silently judging Bond Street sweater-refolder had offered to help me I’d have interpreted her polite query as “what the hell are you doing in here, you ill-dressed fatso?” and backed out of the shop blushing.
These days I could happily stroll into the scariest of emporia: Chanel, say, or Donna Karan — not breezy mid-market DKNY — but the £1,000-a-frock real deal where a male assistant once coldly appraised my size: “Take off your coat so I can look at your figure.”
Now I’d breeze in even when a posh shop is empty, when its whole staff of skinny model-a-likes might turn to look me up and down with bored deathray eyes. I’d go in wearing my school-gate parka with unwashed, roots-need-doing hair, carrying a Lidl’s bag. I’d try on a dozen things and hand them all back without apology and not give a gilt button what anyone said after I’d gone.
Because over the years I’ve learnt how to intimidate right back. My life is shorter now, as is my patience. I don’t want to mooch around Top Shop happily invisible for teenage hours. If I have to fumble through packed rails for my size without an offer of help or stand in line for 20 minutes for the privilege of giving the Gap Corporation my money, I will probably walk out. I want service, dammit, and I want it now.
It is no surprise that, in a survey conducted by Verdict, the market analysts, John Lewis was this week voted the nation’s favourite shop. It is certainly mine. In a culture of bloated consumerism, where shopping has become our national sport and an end in itself, when a “must have” means a £700 bag that will be “so over” by summer and we gorge ourselves on cheap clothes made by cheaper labour that we will wear only once, John Lewis sells things you actually need. Its haberdashery department reminds us that our clothes can still be made and mended, its basement full of arcane cleaning products reminds us, that, with effort, things can last. Because this rarefied new capitalism that insists every object in our lives is transient, disposable, instantly obsolete makes manufacturers rich and economies grow, but it does not make human beings happy.
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Yesterday at John Lewis I bought boys’ cricket whites, a new Dictaphone and a juicer attachment for my food mixer. The guiltless pleasure, the housewifely glow of dull, practical purchases. I have bought every item of white goods I’ve ever owned at John Lewis, my bed linen and stair carpet.
I have never tested out the “never knowingly undersold” promise: I simply regard it as an item of faith.
Besides, I don’t really shop there for the price, though it’s comforting to know I am probably not being fleeced, but because like Holly Golightly in Tiffany’s, I feel nothing bad could ever happen in John Lewis. Not in a calm and orderly universe, with a customer loo on every floor, where kindly hands carry your nasty heavy bags down to the ground floor dispatch so you can pick them up when you’ve trawled the rest of vile Oxford Street. Not where a smartly dressed staff member calls you madam and can talk with authority about whatever he is selling, from net curtains to nail varnish, rather than turning a product over and over dumbly in his hands searching the packaging for answers, like they do in Dixons.
It figures that, as the result of a visionary experiment in industrial democracy by the company’s founder, John Lewis’s 63,000 permanent staff are all partners in the firm, receiving bonuses based on the company’s profits. Therefore the lady who opened an extra till for me yesterday merely because I was behind a queue of three, or the blokes who delivered my bed cheerfully and on time, have an investment in my happiness.
In the past six years, shopping on the internet has grown by 2,600 per cent. One in every ten pounds of retail spending now happens online. Internet firms can offer a range of goods beyond even the grandest department store, their low overheads mean lower prices and there is instant gratification in those must-have shoes being only a click away. The only weapon still left at the high street’s disposal is personal service, making shopping a satisfying human exchange rather than just a commercial one.
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Despite its season of lovely cardies, Marks & Spencer, once staffed by older ladies of faultless efficiency, came 31st in the Verdict survey. On my last visit, after a ten-minute search for help I was served by a 20-year-old gum-chewer with a bad attitude. Maybe the key to restoring its fortunes would be less money spent putting Twiggy on telly and more on staff training.
Because although the supermarkets win the majority of our business, they do not have our hearts: Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco came 33rd favourite out of 69 stores in the survey. Smaller specialist shops with expert staff are not dying out as everyone predicted. A butcher just opened on our high street, not a poncey overpriced organic enterprise but a proper, free-bones-for-your-dog, bawdy joking, sausage-making, old-fashioned butcher. The shop is thriving. Likewise my husband’ s favourite store is our local bike shop, Edwardes of Camberwell, where last week the owner watched my son proudly empty his piggy bank pound by pound to buy a new bicycle and told funny stories about his own grandsons. For that kind of service, it’s almost worth getting your bike nicked.