Shopgirls (32 page)

Elected as leader of the Conservative opposition in 1975, Margaret Thatcher embraced Brent Cross and its enterprising spirit. She was a politician who understood shops. She had, famously, been brought up in one, living above the Roberts’ family grocer’s in Grantham and helping out behind the counter as a schoolgirl in the 1930s.

Behind the counter there were three rows of splendid mahogany spice drawers with sparkling brass handles, and on top of these stood large, black, lacquered tea canisters. One of the tasks I sometimes shared was the weighing out of tea, sugar and biscuits from the sacks and boxes in which they arrived into 1lb and 2lb bags. In a cool back room we called ‘the old bake house’ hung sides of bacon which had to be boned and cut up for slicing. Wonderful aromas of spices, coffees and smoked hams would waft through the house.
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For all her apparently warm memories, Thatcher rarely returned to her ‘boring’ home town once she’d left for Oxford in 1943.
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But her brand of Conservatism would always pull in two different directions – on the one hand, looking back to the traditional community values that had shaped her upbringing and, on the other, forwards to an unfettered free market that she believed held the key to future prosperity.

In February 1978 she made an official visit to Brent Cross where these two worlds momentarily collided. A brief note in the Thatcher Foundation archive records the event:

MT was accompanied by Monty Modlyn, who lived in the area. The
Finchley Times
, 23 February 1978, reported an enthusiastic reception. MT played ‘Michael, Row the Boat Ashore’ on an electric organ at Minns Music Store, met Mrs Margaret Lyon who went to school with her in Grantham, and wrote ‘Margaret Thatcher for No. 10’ on a postcard. Another shopper handed her an Abba record for signature. Seeing the title – ‘Take a Chance on Me’ – MT observed, ‘I think that’s appropriate for a politician’. She revealed that the dress she was wearing came from Marks and Spencer when Marcus Sieff welcomed her to the local branch.
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As this tantalising note doesn’t record it, we can only imagine the fleeting conversation between Mrs Thatcher and Mrs Lyon, her former classmate. Grantham was still a quiet market town, untouched by boutique counter-culture or concrete shopping precincts. What would its residents, and her grocer father in particular, have made of Brent Cross and the new Britain which had made it possible? Significantly, the archivist at the Thatcher Foundation has categorised the Brent Cross visit as ‘trivial’. Perhaps it is, compared to the more momentous events documented in the collection. But Mrs Thatcher herself might beg to differ. More than most politicians of her day, she understood the place of shopping in many people’s – especially women’s – lives and played on it throughout her own political life. Married to a millionaire, she still knew how to work a crowd in an everyday M&S dress.

Shoplife shaped her politics. Concepts like value, choice, competition, prudence and, above all, service, were second nature to her. As she put it, ‘Life “over the shop” is much more than a phrase. It is something which those who have lived it know to be quite distinctive. For one thing, you are always on duty. People would knock on the door at almost any hour of the night or weekend if they ran out of bacon, sugar, butter or eggs.’ She learnt a sharp lesson from this: ‘Everyone knew we lived by serving the customer; it was pointless to complain – and so nobody did.’
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This Margaret would have had little sympathy for the earlier efforts of another – Margaret Bondfield, similarly steeped in shoplife, but a very different kind of political pioneer – to encourage shopworkers to stand up for their rights.

One right that Margaret Thatcher most certainly believed in was the ‘right to buy’. She may have been the first to put it in those terms but she wasn’t the first to see the appeal of the broad idea. Earlier generations of activists – on the left, on the right and in the co-op movement – had shared this basic belief. Badged in different ways, it had underpinned rival political platforms for over a century, from co-operatism and struggles for a ‘living wage’ to campaigns for free trade. Opinions differed sharply, of course, on the best and most practical ways to ensure that people across the social scale had ‘enough’ in their purses and pockets to buy not only the goods and services on which they depended but also those they desired.

The women working in Britain’s post-war shops – from art-school boutiques to the all-encompassing Brent Cross – understood that they too ‘lived by serving the customer’. But they also lived by leading the customer, helping to shape their needs and desires, their self-image and expectations. Ultimately, these shopgirls and their successors have played a vital part in creating a world in which the speed, scale and sensations of ‘shopping’ as we have known it have been utterly transformed.

Brent Cross marked the beginning of a new era of out-of-town buying, but it also opened in the midst of a dramatic decline in the number of Britain’s shops. The move of many shoppers to out-of-town developments played a part in this, but it wasn’t entirely to blame. While the total number of stores had peaked at nearly a million in the 1920s, it had been falling ever since. For a period after the Second World War, it looked as though the decline had slowed, but by the time that Margaret Thatcher played ‘Row the Boat Ashore’ in a Brent Cross music outlet, there were fewer than 400,000 stores in Britain.
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Some researchers now predict that the total number will continue to shrink to 220,000 by 2018 as ‘bricks’ give way to ‘clicks’ with the inexorable rise of online retail. Shopping as we have known it is changing fast.

Retail gurus are alternately gung-ho and gloomy. Mary ‘Queen of Shops’ Portas has called for a radical overhaul of the high street. Her sparring partner, Bill Grimsey, former head of leading DIY and other chain stores, insists that her efforts are too little too late, given that around fifty independent businesses are closing each week and nearly one sixth of all retail space lies vacant. Meanwhile, the British already buy more online than any other country. Topshop boss Philip Green was recently asked to offer some top tips to fellow traders and he put it bluntly: ‘If you were starting out from scratch today, would you have shops at all?’
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The William Whiteleys of today are more likely to begin with a website.

Surprisingly, in spite of this slow decline in the number of bricks-and-mortar shops, there have been plenty of job opportunities to be had in retail. Retail encompasses not just shopwork in physical stores, but employment in sales, store operations, security, management, buying and merchandising, and also distribution, e-commerce, finance and human resources. Taken together, retail remains Britain’s largest private sector employer and makes up around 10 per cent of all jobs across the country.
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Until now, while actual shops have been closing, shopwork has not been disappearing. With British people spending increasing amounts on consumer goods, the number of people employed in the sector reached an all-time high of 2.7 million in 2012, of which 1.7 million were women employed in sales and customer service.
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These are our shopgirls and shopwomen of today.

As throughout the last 150 years, retail continues to employ a young workforce: one million of our shopworkers are under twenty-five years of age and over 40 per cent of all sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds in work are employed in this sector. It is also now a firmly female workforce. Over two thirds of our shopworkers are women – a figure unthinkable to those early nineteenth-century shopkeepers such as the Glaswegian provisions dealer who dismissed his ‘Romantic Freak’ shop assistant on discovering that ‘he’ was, in fact, ‘of the feminine gender’, and those hundreds of Victorian proprietors who fretted over opening up their craft to shopgirls.

Many aspects of retail have changed since those early days: basic working conditions, living-in, shopgirls’ moral status as women in the public eye. Despite this, many shops still largely depend on low-paid workers willing to work flexible hours: school leavers and working mums. Today, as in the past, only a minority of the country’s shopworkers belong to a trade union and in some respects working conditions have come full circle. In 1994, a century’s worth of hard-won reforms were repealed at a stroke by the Deregulation Act, one of Prime Minister John Major’s most far-reaching parting shots. The legislation annulled all previous Shop Acts, freeing up trading hours to meet our apparently insatiable consumer demand. Ever since then, large stores have been able to open for twenty-four hours Monday through Saturday and for six hours on a Sunday. Small stores face no restrictions at all and can, if they wish, open 24/7 for 365 days of the year, including Easter Sunday and Christmas Day. This has helped turn the majority of shop assistants into part-time workers. If Margaret Bondfield were alive today, she’d still be champing at the bit, trying to coax shop assistants to join a union, and fiercely championing shopworkers’ rights to better pay and conditions.

However, it now looks like we are at a tipping point in terms of shopworker numbers too. For the first time in decades, the number of shop assistants seems likely to fall. Indeed, the job profile for ‘Sales Assistant’ on the government’s National Careers Service website predicts a drop in the number of people employed in sales and customer service over the next five years – a drop linked to the combined effect of efficiencies, recession and the ongoing online revolution.
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Mary Portas, who started out as a John Lewis Saturday girl before becoming one of the youngest members of the board of Harvey Nichols, believes that the stores that will survive these seismic shifts will be those that treat their staff with respect and offer customers not just expertise and value for money but an all-round experience.

For though sweeping change is afoot, we are still shopping and being served in physical shops. High streets may be losing ground but they still account for over 40 per cent of all consumer spending. Over the past two centuries shopping has become nothing less than our national past time and many will find it a hard habit to break. Collectively, we still spend more time shopping than we do on any other single activity outside work – as much as eighteen hours a week according to one recent survey and a combined total of eight years of our lives, according to another.

Part of what drives us to do this, of course, is that we shop out of necessity for the food, clothes and other essentials that we cannot get any other way. After all, most of our nineteenth-century ancestors didn’t become consumers for fun: if they were among the working poor, they became consumers to live. But along the way, together with the better-off, they found new pleasures and developed new kinds of sociability in and around shopping. And it’s arguably these things that continue to draw so many of us to the shops today: we have strong emotional attachments to both the stores and, very often, the people who help us within them.

Shops suffuse our earliest memories.
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As babies and children, it’s quite likely that we spent a fair amount of time in and around shops for the simple reason that shopping is one of the few tasks that can be achieved with young children in tow. Beyond that, particular visits to specific shops are often markers of personal milestones: being taken to buy our first pair of shoes, school uniform, wristwatch or teenage party outfit; spending our first wage packet; choosing gifts for birthdays, engagements, weddings and retirements. Equally, being unable to afford to be part of these modern rituals of buying and giving can hurt and be a source of shame.

The fact that shopping allows us to give to others – and to give much more than formal gifts and presents – is hugely important. Everyday shopping is nothing less than an act of love.
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Buying things for others – food, clothes, toys or treats – is an everyday way of showing we care, that we’ve thought about what others need or want. In effect, we ‘say it through shopping’. To view consumer culture this way – as an intensely social part of life, built on relationships – is to challenge the more wearily familiar line that it is shallow, self-centred and individualizing. Perhaps the pursuit of small personal pleasures, alongside the promise of the ‘experience’, may yet keep our shopping rituals alive.

At one level, we still crave convenience and low prices over all other considerations. To that end, we will never come face to face with many of the ‘shop assistants’ who serve us from cavernous warehouses and distribution centres as we ‘click and collect’ in ever greater numbers. Where Amazon has led, big supermarkets, department stores, chains and many others have closely followed.

But convenience has never been everything. The Angry Brigade were certainly right that shopping was about spectacle. What they would never understand, however, is why so many shoppers – quite knowingly – lapped it up. On Regent Street in London today, for example, luxury stores are reinventing the shopping experience yet again and, as so often in the past, fashion is leading the charge. Modern shop assistants must work with, and alongside, interactive technologies, as well as being expert at good old-fashioned selling techniques. The Burberry store features a huge interactive screen, five hundred hidden speakers, a hydraulic stage and microchipped clothes. If they are so inclined, customers trying an outfit can check themselves out sashaying down an interactive catwalk. A few doors away, Karl Lagerfeld’s store has iPads on its rails that help customers to assemble a complete look. Having made your selection and found the changing room, you can upload a ‘selfie’ featuring your new gear to the store’s – and your own – social media streams. And the actual buying is more likely to happen later – on the customer’s smartphone or tablet.

When Steve Jobs launched the world’s first smartphone – Apple’s iPhone – in 2007, he challenged customers to buy what they ‘didn’t know they wanted.’
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Jobs knew that even some Apple devotees didn’t quite get the point of this new device, but he also knew that this wouldn’t matter in the least once they experienced what it had to offer and what they could view – and acquire – in a few touches of the screen. He was right. In under a decade, smartphones have revolutionized retail. In the next five years, online purchases are predicted to account for a fifth of all UK sales and most of these will have been made on a mobile. You can, of course, buy a smartphone itself without setting foot in a real store, but Apple wants it both ways. Their new stores, like the one on Regent Street, have done away with conventional trappings – no counters, no checkouts. Almost the minute you cross the threshold, you will be greeted by one of a team of blue T-shirted assistants – all eager converts to the cause – and guided through what is certainly a new kind of ‘experience’, which may involve propping up the instore ‘genius bar’ for a time. Apple say that their assistants defy rigid definition. They are definitely not ‘sales staff’. Instead they are ‘people who love technology and people who love people’ as well as ‘musicians, photographers, mountain climbers, students and artists whose interests can’t be defined by a job description’.