The worldview of Which? has a moral clarity that is missing from nearly every other sphere of life these days
As supermarket giants puzzle over their profit warnings and the nation readies itself to spend a household average of 800 quid it doesn’t have, here’s a quick rundown of festive scams. I don’t mean drunk people in reindeer horns pretending to have lost their wallet and asking for two pounds; that’s next month.
No, I mean the ways we are ripped off in shops. I quite like an old-fashioned swindle, it gives me a sense of continuity: the person who designed the chocolate finger packet so it contains more air than finger is descended on a direct moral line from the grocer of olden days who used to hide a clog in a bag of flour. It is reassuringly simple: most of gangster capitalism is only barely understood by the people perpetrating it, and makes the victim feel foolish, not only for having been the mark in the first place but also for the sudden spotlight on their ignorance. I personally would like to see someone go to prison every time one of us is required to learn a new acronym: if we’d instituted that after the Libor scandal, would there ever have been a Forex?
Clearly, retailers couldn’t stay competitive if they didn’t keep up with the modern world of the corporate predator. Not every consumer shakedown is a period piece: the great cheese swindle, in which wholesale prices have gone down while supermarkets – apparently by wild coincidence, and certainly not because anybody thinks they’re operating as a cartel – put their prices up, has a lot in common with today’s energy market. What we need is some kind of regulatory body to monitor the undulations of milk protein. We could call it Ofcheese. I will happily take charge of that, when the time comes.
But back to the shops, where a new Which? survey suggests there are three broad categories of swindle: making you buy a thing because you think it’s better quality than it is; because you think it’s better value than it is; or because you think it’s healthier than it is. The tricks are so craven, it’s a little embarrassing to name them. The own brand might be designed to be indistinguishable from the branded version. Goodfella’s pizzas print calorie counts based on a person eating only one quarter of a pizza, which nobody has ever done since pizzas were invented. Biscuits loaded with sugar are called “light” because they have reduced their proportion of fat (what with the scandal of the air-Fingers on one hand, and McVitie’s “lite” digestives on the other, I think we could also make a case for the creation of Ofbiscuit). Fruit juices that are mainly apple are adorned with two strawberries and called “strawberry smoothie”. This has solved two mysteries that have plagued me throughout my child-rearing years: how can anyone afford to produce 300ml of pure strawberry juice? (Because that’s not what it is.) And what is the point of the word “smoothie”? (Unlike “juice”, there is no widely understood definition of the word, separate from the product. So you don’t have to name it after what it’s actually made of; you can name it after something it reminds you of.)
Department stores hunt bigger game, packaging things as “gift sets” in order to stick an unwarranted 20% on their prices. We’ve known that for years. And they engage in affective propaganda, trying to manipulate your gift-giving mindset to include people like cousins. You can snort at this, confident you will never be so sheep-like as to buy a pepper grinder for someone whose name you have been known to get wrong. But consider: do you do Halloween? There is no such thing as the successful refusnik of marketing strategies, only variations of late adopter.
What I really love about Which? surveys – indeed, the existence of Which? as an institution – is the sense of moral clarity. There is very broad-based agreement, across the political spectrum, that people selling things ought to be open and honest about what they’re selling. There is total consensus in the shopping universe that markets are social spaces, and like any other social space will only function if people treat others as they themselves would want to be treated. This certainty has gone missing from conversations elsewhere: a banking scandal always comes garnished with people arguing that the financial sector is so wedged with talent that it should be unleashed from moral codes, the better to dazzle us with its heady ambitions. Business is increasingly presented as a quixotic, ungovernable process, upon which we all rely so heavily, and to which we should render such gratitude, that it is not for us to question it. Inevitably, this comes with the expectation that the successful entrepreneur or innovator will be sociopathic – indeed, that that’s what marks him or her out as so special: the ability to separate themselves from the muddled matters of trust and sympathy that beset the world of the non-entrepreneur. And yet, somehow, we’ve retained this elemental demand for fairness at the till. “Buyer beware” doesn’t cut it: the seller also has a responsibility not to con people. Granted, it’s not a responsibility they take very seriously, least of all at Christmas, but it’s heartening that we’re still bothering to articulate it.
Incidentally, the way to prevent overspending in supermarkets and department stores is to wear headphones piping extremely loud, motivational music; it doesn’t have to be anti-consumerist in content, just bouncy, the kind of thing joggers listen to. It does more than speed up your progress around the shop, it taps into a part of your psyche that doesn’t need unnecessary stuff because it already feels great. Complaining about shops and their moral deficiencies is necessary but insufficient. I would like to see shops treated a bit more like shoplifters – prosecuted for dishonesty even when it seems petty – and shoplifters treated a bit more like shops.
For now I just need an iPod, and my red-blooded resistance will commence.
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