TVs and DVD players cost 45% less, in real terms, than they
did a decade ago; in the same period, the price of computers
has fallen by 93%. High street prices have never been so low,
but what kind of consumers do we become when we can buy
a handbag for £3 - and then chuck it away? Andy Beckett on
how the bargain boom changed the way Britain shops
Going Cheap
It is a brilliant blue winter morning in Oxford. In the city centre,
surrounded by golden stone walls and college battlements, the
125th and newest branch of Primark is open for its second day of
business. A neat, middle-aged woman comes out of the shop with
three full carrier bags. What has she bought? The woman gives
a satisfied look. “All sorts. Baby clothes for my grandson ...” She
pauses. “Well, handbags mainly, actually.” She opens one of her
carriers and offers a glimpse of a woven handbag in a pleasing pas-
tel. How many bags has she bought? Her expression sharpens to
something between guilt and mischief: “Nine.” How much were
they? “£3 each.” But what is she going to do with nine handbags?
Is she going to sell them? “No.” She pauses again, as if the answer
is quite obvious. “You never know when a bag is going to come in
handy when they’re £3 a time.”
In Britain in recent years, as in other rich countries, many
consumer goods have become deliciously, dizzyingly cheap. Since
1995, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the
price of women’s clothing has fallen by 34%, the price of a vac-
uum cleaner by 45%, of home audio-visual equipment by 73%,
and of personal computers - adjusting the price index to take
account of their improved capabilities - by a scarcely believeable
93%. Economists have struggled to find historical precedents for
such plunging prices at a time of high consumer demand. “There
is a strange conjucture: deflation and boom,” wrote the veteran
commentator Hamish McRae in the Independent on Sunday in
2004. “There has not been anything quite like this since the 1930s
or ... the period 1870-1913,” eras when prices fell despite growing
consumer appetites.
And in those days there was no Primark or easyJet, no Zara or
Ikea, no Book People, Matalan or TK Maxx; no supermarkets
or factory outlets; no ubiquitous three-for-two offers; no instant
price comparisons via the internet; no weekly women’s magazines
urging weekly wardrobe revisions; no just-in-time production,
and overnight global distribution, and myriad factories humming
in China.
“We’re in uncharted waters,” says Richard Hyman, managing
director of the retail analysts Verdict Research. “This deflation is
not cyclical. Our forecasts do not anticipate any major increase in
retail price inflation ever again.”
Hyman, like most adults in most wealthy societies, grew up in the
late 20th century decades when inflation was a prominent, recur-
ring anxiety. The public and politicians, and the media, often took
rising prices to mean that things, in a cosmic or a very concrete
sense, were getting worse. The implications of modern deflation
may be equally large. Yet while the production of cheap modern
consumer goods, and in particular its social and environmental
costs, has justifiably received a lot of attention, the consumption
of these products has been examined less. How is the era of the
£3 handbag affecting our attitudes to possessions? Are we happier
or less content with what we have? Are cheap goods liberating or
imprisoning? And what - once we’ve bought them, and especially
once we’ve finished with them - do we do with them all?
How we shop is the first stage in how we consume, and even a
few minutes in the Oxford Primark tells you that shopping has
changed. The sound is the first thing: a thick hum of conversa-
tion, almost at party volume, anticipation mingling with delight
mingling with satisfaction; and the constant plastic clatter of
clothes rails and hangers being rapidly rifled. Department stores
during the sales sound like this, but not nearly as loud, and the
Oxford Primark has opened in February with national consumer
activity, according to the official figures, in an even deeper sea-
sonal trough than usual. Yet the shop’s plain interior is as busy as
Harrods, with people in tracksuits and people in tweed, teenagers,
pensioners, mothers and men with fashionable bags. And the Pri-
mark shopping baskets they carry are half the size of a beer barrel.
In the old days, customers in clothes shops bought things in ones
and twos; at Primark, they cater for people buying in dozens.
Many professional observers think this new shopping culture is a
great improvement. Hyman says, “There’s an American adage: the
customer is king. In the UK, all it has ever been is an adage. Now,
for the first time, it’s reality.”
Gareth Coombs of the Cambridge Strategy Centre, a retail
consultancy, sees the social implications: “People used to define
themselves as shopping at a certain level. ‘I’m an M&S shop-
per.’ It defined your place in the world. Those sort of rules aren’t
sustainable any more.” Tamar Kasriel of the Henley Centre, the
social forecasters, is blunter: “The idea that cheap goods are for
poor people is totally history.”
Cheap goods in themselves are hardly new. In fact, it is striking
how long the retailers at the centre of the current British bargain
boom have been around. Primark began trading in Britain in
the early 1970s, TopShop in the early 1960s, and most of the
supermarkets soon after the second world war. Resale price main-
tenance, which restricted by law the ability of shops to discount
goods, was abolished in 1964.
Yet, for decades afterwards, more subtle limits on “the value sec-
tor”, as it was a little dismissively known, endured. Britain being
Britain, one of these was class. It is probably not a coincidence
that the countries with the longest established cheap retail cultures
are the ones with a strong current of social mobility and relative
classlessness, such as America and postwar Germany and modern
Ireland. In Britain, until the loosening of class structures during
the 1980s and 1990s, things were different. “Cheapness had a
connotation,” says Gillian Cutress, editor of the Official Great
British Factory Shop Guide. In 1985, when she started research-
ing her first pioneering book on discount outlets, she quickly
became aware that she was entering sensitive territory.
Cutress was an out-of-work zoologist living in Nottingham. She
was a Londoner with a determined manner, an interest in facto-
ries, and a totally unsqueamish appetite for bargains then consid-
ered rare among the professional classes. The East Midlands, she
soon discovered, was full of clothing and footwear manufacturers
who sold off their seconds and surplus lines at big discounts to
staff and people in the know. But these factory outlets were open
only a few hours a week and were not advertised: “Many of the
manufacturers wanted them to be kept quiet because they didn’t
want to upset the retailers [which they also supplied].” As Cutress
drove round industrial estates asking nosy questions, she also
discovered something else: “People made the assumption that our
readers would be people with less disposable income.”
This assumption proved wrong. “Our readership turned out to be
people with time and spare money,” says Cutress. Over the next
20 years, her guides got thicker and glossier and came to cover the
whole country, selling more than 600,000 copies. More than that,
however, they contributed to a slow but significant shift in British
consumer thinking.
Until well into the 1990s, the idea that Britain was expensive and
that there was little shoppers could do about it was widely held.
“Rip-off Britain” became a frequent target for newspaper cam-
paigns, but the solution usually offered was for the government to
intervene or for consumers to stock up in the cheaper supermar-
kets across the channel. Yet while the controversy sputtered on,
many shoppers were quietly finding new ways to avoid paying the
full price. Factory outlets, like the low-cost airlines that started up
in Britain in the mid-1990s, taught people that the price of goods
was not written in stone but subject to context and, in particu-
lar, the balance of power between seller and buyer. “There is no
guilt any more at being brutal about seeking the best price,” says
Coombs.
Instead of guilt, there is pleasure. As well as the money people
save by finding bargains, Coombs and other analysts talk about
the satisfaction felt by consumers when they “get a victory” over a
retailer - and when they tell their friends about it afterwards. The
latter activity, in a sure sign of its popularity, has recently acquired
a would-be scientific label: “compulsive price disclosure”.
But after you have bragged about your bargains you have to live
with them. And at this stage you may become aware that cheap
consumer goods do not always go with the grain of other current
British social trends. “Over the last 10 years,” says Hyman, “we
calculate that women have doubled the average number of wom-
enswear items they buy in a year.” But over the same period, the
cost of living space has been rising as fast, or even faster. One con-
sequence, says David Mitchell, technical director of the House-
builders’ Federation, is that developers are “keeping new houses
as small as possible to keep the price down”. Meanwhile, planning
regulations and the changing tastes of home-owners are filling
these dwellings with ever larger and more numerous bathrooms,
and more fitted kitchen appliances. The space left over for storage
is shrinking accordingly.
“It is a worry,” Mitchell says. “Eventually something’s got to give
between how much we own and how much space we live in.”
The solutions may not be elegant. Garden sheds, he says, are
growing in popularity, as cheap spaces for general storage rather
than tools. “And some developers are making garages half a metre
longer than they need to be so people can put stuff at the back.”
Many homeowners have already gone further: in a current article
on outer-London suburbia, the sociologist Paul Barker notes that
most garages have been given over to “household junk”. The cars
are parked in people’s front gardens.
For people who have exhausted, or never had such hoarding
possibilities, there is the modern self-storage industry. Until the
mid-1990s, the idea of keeping many of your possessions in a
locked room away from where you lived was largely foreign to
Britain, and confined to bigger countries with more mobile popu-
lations, such as America. Now there are about 700 British storage
facilities, says Rodney Walker, chief executive of the Self-Storage
Association, and the business is expanding at 10% a year. “It is
a local market in most cases,” he says. “Customers live nearby.”
Does he think the take-off in demand has anything to do with
the simultaneous boom in cheap goods? “You’re not on the wrong
track.”
You could see all this hoarding as a sign of a growing attachment
to possessions. But Coombs sees it as the opposite. “What was in
the living room this year will be in the bedroom next year and in
the junk room the year after,” he says. Kasriel says the chance to
sell to eBay has boosted much we buy. “You can tell yourself you
have a sensible financial route out.”
Unashamedly “disposable” cheap goods, you could argue, are
turning us into traders rather than curators of our possessions.
It is another victory for capitalism: we have internalised the
unsentimental stock control of the modern retailer. Juliet Schor,
an American economist and leading critic of the bargain boom,
thinks this new form of ownership is less pleasurable than the old
one. “The psychologically satisfying process of personalisation that
occurs when products are acquired and retained, is truncated,”
she writes in a recent essay. “Attachment is briefer and there is
the constant pain of divestiture [getting rid of things].” What
individual possessions represent to us is, she says, “more externally
driven” - by marketing and advertising - and “less under the con-
trol of the individual consumer”.
Shoppers at Primark in Oxford are cheerier about all this. “I was
brought up with thrift,” says an elderly man with a cravat and a
perfect white moustache. “Brought up not to buy anything unless
the old thing was worn out. But three T-shirts for a fiver ...” He
holds them up: “They look very good.” His eyes sparkle: “This is
incredible.”
I ask the woman with all the handbags what she does when her
cupboards get full at home. “I’ll just have a clear-out,” she says
without hesitation. “Take stuff to charity. Chuck it away if it’s
broken.” Another woman, prosperous-looking, who has bought
a duvet, towels and T-shirts for her three children, says with a
mildly troubled expression: “I know we live in a throwaway soci-
ety. It’s bad for the environment. It’s wasteful. But at home, when
we can’t fit anything more on the clothes rails, I try and pass it to
a collection for the third world.” She says her family reaches this
point “quite often”.
Mending things is coming to seem old- fashioned. “The financial
equation’s changed,” says Coombs. “The price of getting a DVD
player looked at is probably half what it cost. And we’re time
poor. Why waste the time?”
On Tottenham Court Road in central London, the capital’s tradi-
tional quarter for selling and fixing electronic goods, a man called
Vic is living with the consequences of this shift. He has been
repairing gadgets round here for 20 years, but his current premises
feel less than permanent. At the back of one of the more down-
market shops there is a sign partly obscured by a cheap flat-screen
television; through a nearby open hatch, there is a windowless
room full of shelves and ailing camcorders where Vic works.
“Ten years ago, people started closing the local repair shops,” he
explains, with his trademark mix of patience and weariness. “But
if anyone brought anything into a shop round here to be fixed,
the shop would say, ‘Go to Vic.’ Now the shops say, ‘Don’t bother.
Just buy a new one.’” He claims manufacturers are deliberately
making disposable products: “They only last as long as the guaran-
tee. So they can sell more rubbish. If the machine needs a part,
you have to buy it from the manufacturer for £100, £200 - and
we have to put labour on top. If I can’t charge £50 [for that] I
can’t survive around here.”
He says he can fix so many different gadgets that there will always
be work for him. But in future, he believes, electronic handy-
men won’t exist; there will only be specialists, mending the most
expensive items. Everything else will be thrown out at the first
hint of malfunction.
According to the European Commission, “Electro-scrap is the
fastest growing waste stream [in the EU], growing at 3-5% per
year”, three times faster than domestic waste in general. In 2002,
a European directive was issued requiring member countries to
ensure the “re-use, recovery and recycling” of discarded electronic
goods. Some retail analysts think the directive - especially its
sections on the “financial obligations of producers” to be envi-
ronmentally responsible, and on how “consumers will be able
to take [discarded] products back to shops for free” - will have a
significant effect on the cheap electronics market. But Britain and
several other countries have yet to comply.
The harmful metals and chemicals in many electrical goods,
and the difficulty of disposing of them, make the less palatable
consequences of increased consumption obvious. The afterlife of
discarded budget clothing is more ambiguous. Since 1990, the
global trade in secondhand garments has grown tenfold. Clothes
are collected in rich countries by charities and commercial traders,
shipped to poor countries and sold by local stallholders. In some
African countries, more than 80% of people buy secondhand gar-
ments, and it is the dominant source of clothing.
“Affordability is the key reason,” concluded a report by the charity
Oxfam last year, “[but] fashion and consumer preferences also
seem to be shifting away from traditional, ‘African’-style to more
‘western’-style clothing.” Oxfam also concluded that second-
hand imports were likely to have played a role in the collapse of
garment manufacturing in parts of Africa since the 1980s. The
trade was tainted as well by “considerable customs fraud”, which
reduced government revenues across the continent. Yet the report
identified considerable benefits too; hundreds of thousands of
livelihoods in Africa were supported by washing, repairing, restyl-
ing, distributing and selling the clothes.
The charity’s real worry is not the ethics of the trade but the
quantity and quality of the garments nowadays. “Over the last
seven years,” says Barney Tallack, Oxfam’s deputy trading director,
“a greater proportion has been of cheaper quality.” A T-shirt that
costs £3 new can’t be sold for much secondhand at an Oxfam
shop in Britain. To make the same profit as before the bargain
clothing boom began, the shop needs to receive, sort, clean and
sell more garments. “We have to work harder,” says Tallack.
At the cavernous Oxfam shop in Dalston, in east London, the
most profitable in the country, the clothes rails are like crammed
graveyards for discount labels: TopShop, Zara, Hennes, Old
Navy, George Essentials. The bright clean colours of many of the
clothes have barely faded; the garments look hardly worn. In the
storeroom behind the shop there are three booths, each the size of
several phoneboxes, piled with bags of clothing.”They’re usually
almost filled to the ceiling,” says the manager.
The diminishing returns yielded by discount clothing may also
ultimately destroy the global secondhand trade. Such items dete-
riorate quickly, says Alan Wheeler of the textile recycling associa-
tion. “People in Africa do not want to wear tatty clothes.”
For all the pleasures and popularity and modernity of the bargain
boom, a strong sense remains that it is too good to last. Even the
Primark shoppers in Oxford share it. I ask the woman with the
handbags if she thinks the prices of such things will stay this low
for good. “No, I don’t,” she says. Buying nine handbags suddenly Andy Beckett
seems less like the confident exercise of a new consumer power The Guardian G2, 28th February 2006
and more like the nervy instinct of the old-style bargain hunter:
never hesitate when faced with a special offer.

The frivolity of buying a £3 T-shirt can be overstated. For the

comfortably off, money saved on cheap basic goods can be spent
on luxuries. “Connoisseurship moves to other areas,” says the
social observer Peter York, such as house alterations and designer
labels. “But for everyone else, cheap goods are simply affordable.”

For a rich country, Britain has a lot of people who are short of
money. One of them was the last person I interviewed outside
Primark. She was 21, smartly dressed, and worked for Oxford city
council. “I shop in cheap shops,” she said. “The council doesn’t
pay enough and Oxford is an expensive place to live. My council
tax is going up. The rent, the travel ...”

Since 1995, according to the ONS, average rail fares have risen
36%, the cost of petrol 63%, and the average council tax by
100%. As many goods have got cheaper, many services - particu-
larly those which cannot, for now at least, be performed from
countries with cheaper labour - have got more expensive. The
ONS index of the overall cost of services is up by almost half over
the past 10 years. Then there are university fees, the pensions
crisis, unemployment swelling again, the frightening prices of
gas and oil; Coombs characterises these contemporary financial
pressures as “a vague rumbling in the background” of the lives of
otherwise confident modern consumers. Kasriel provides evidence
that the anxiety and the profligacy are sometimes linked: “In one
of our focus groups last year, someone said, ‘You used to save be-
cause you didn’t know what was going to happen. Now you spend
because you don’t know what’s going to happen.’”

Ethical and political considerations have yet to check this impulse

significantly. Western consumers have known about the Victorian
environmental practices, pay rates and working conditions of
Asian manufacturing since at least the start of the decade. “Poor
people [there] are subsidising the standard of living of consumers
in the rich north,” as Schor puts it. However, she continues,”The
connection between labour conditions and price has not yet been
made.” Or it has been made by consumers, and then quietly put
to the back of their minds. At Primark in Oxford, the shoppers
all sounded genuinely concerned when I brought up the cheap
labour issue, but they did not linger over the subject.

An even less pleasurable topic never came up at all: that there is a

political as well as an economic world order that makes modern
discount shopping possible. The overwhelming power of America,
the lingering power of Europe and the other traditionally rich
parts of the world, and recent economic history all play their
part. Schor points out that the bargain boom began shortly after
the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s; in countries such as
Indonesia and Thailand, there was suddenly an increased supply
of people prepared to work for very low wages.

It is hard to read a newspaper without realising that this balance

of power between east and west is altering. In this context, the
big questions about how we live with our cheap possessions and
whether we really like them and what we do when we’ve finished
with them may ultimately be dwarfed by an even bigger issue. “If
other countries come to dominate,” Schor says crisply, “We may
be the ones producing cheap T-shirts”.