On the one hand, I feel for retailers. I really do. After all, they are manned by people like you and me. They are run by people like you and me. They aren’t doing anything wrong. But there’s too many of them. Simple as that. Chains and chains as long as your arm. Chains and chains that wrap around the world and make it less globally interesting and more high street. You have to be clever to run a company and make it work, especially so in these tormented times. But you don’t have to be a great brain to manage a shop.
Then again, who wants a brainiac to manage a shop. Most times I don’t want a salesgirl to ask me if they can help me. I can generally help myself and generally the shop won’t have what I want. It is nice of course that they ask and I’m sure they don’t like asking me anymore than I want to be asked. They will have been told they have to keep the customer interested and yet the girls so often look quite uninterested and just as often don’t have a clue what it is you want, even when you tell them. They aren’t trained to steer a customer into something different that he/she will love as much as the thing they wanted. It doesn’t matter anyway. As our debt has proved, we don’t care what we buy. As long as we can appease our inner ragged fashionista self, which hides our general unhappiness, we will buy anything.
Many, many retail companies are going to go under. If Woolies can do it, so can, well, anyone really. The pre and post Christmas sales show that people are still out there spending the money that they don’t have. Credit card companies are perhaps the one kind of lending that hasn’t yet been asked to reduce their interest rates. Why is this? Why are banks and mortgage lenders being asked to do so, yet credit companies are not? This country, like Australia and the USA, has personal debts rising into the trillions. Personal debt is largely supplied by credit cards. If you want it, you can have it. Natwest said so in their advertising at the height of the breathless me me me I want it now malaise. What to do? Ask the Government.
I wonder if gimmickry is the key to success? Not small tacky ones. Big ones like FCUK in its hey day. An inventor of the OTT statement. OTT statements like using Dame Edna Everage as the face of MAC cosmetics. Fantastic. There can be no greater glorifying of woman surely than Dame Edna. A man who wants to dress up as a woman, lilac coloured hair and pert cat glasses is a man who believes in women. Either that or he is being ironic. Is he? Are we femmes the butt of a massive joke? One that has lasted 50 years? Crikey, I hope not, possums. It would be embarrassing to say the least. After all, we have all laughed our guts up at the Dame’s pokes at PC society and famous bods. I dread the day she no longer glides on stage, her arms full of glads.
Just heard on the radio that strapline ad (for something) that is going around where the guy says that his new year resolution is to never fall in love again. Man! He must have got it in the neck during 2008. Poor bugger. Feel for him. Hope a nice girl or boy comes along and mends that broken heart of his.
Until next year, children, au revoir.
Lulu x
