How shopping has taken over our lives

Mimi Spencer on the nation's new compulsive disorder
Paying by credit card gives you more rights. Photograph: Getty Images Scott Barbour/Getty

Four goose-down pillows. One pair of baseball boots. A red dress by Roland Mouret (at Gap). Christmas cookie cutters. One toilet, one sink and a shower. £207-worth of groceries. Fairy recipe book, felt-tip pens, Primark jacket (black, white and a bit sensational). Two bath mats for £10. Porcelain mugs, maxi-pack of ring-bound notebooks, Stain Devil for felt-tip pen, pink plastic clip-on desk light, set of tea towels, a £29.99 DVD player... These, dear reader, are just a few of the things I have bought in the last fortnight. I only know because I wrote them all down, meticulously charting the product build-up and cash leakage as it entered and exited my life. On any average week I would never know quite how much guff I buy, how much time I spend shopping, or how much it costs. Who would? But when it's all captured in a notebook, I'm shocked. Appalled.

Really, though, don't you just love a bargain? Better still, two bargains, possibly for the price of one. Something for silly money. A handbag, perhaps, for a fiver. A set of teaspoons (you always need teaspoons) on a carousel, for less than the cost of a cappuccino. I already have 37 tea towels, by the way. Just counted them. It seems too many. The average woman apparently owns 19 pairs of shoes - which seem too few by comparison with the 65 pairs that reside in the belly of my wardrobe. Some of them haven't seen the light of day since Jesus was a boy child. But I loved them once.

Once, these days, is pretty much the sum of it. The thrill of the new lasts about as long as a sparkler and offers only a meagre flicker of warmth. We know this, of course, but curiously we still buy it all, and then some more, great tumbling mountains of stuff. According to research company Verdict, £1 in every £4 is now spent on 'cheap' chic. Today, value retailers control 23.7 per cent of the clothing business, a slice worth £7.8 billion. Five years ago they laid claim to just 16 per cent. To understand quite how colossal is their impact on our lives, consider that Tesco fashion chief executive Terry Green expects his clothing sales to hit £1billion next year. Or that in 2005, the average spend per head on clothing rose by just £12 a year. £11.80 of this went to value retailers.

The point is that both sides of the bargain have changed - both us and them. For our part, customers have had a radical mood shift when it comes to cheap merchandise. Not long ago, few women would have felt entirely comfortable wearing Tesco to a wedding. Or Asda to work. Back then, we dreamed of Chanel and settled for Jigsaw. Today, plenty of women I know brag about their rock-bottom trophies, prone to bouts of CPD - Compulsive Price Disclosure - in polite company. 'Ten pounds!' we holler proudly across the parks and cafés of the land, 'It was £10, so I bought three!'

'The budget shops are an accepted element of clothing retail now,' says Verdict report author Maureen Hinton. 'There is no longer a stigma attached to shopping for cheap clothes. The value retailers aren't just promoting on price any more - they're promoting real value. When you buy something at Primark or Asda, it's fit for a purpose. In effect, they have become the mainstream retailers.'

Dr Michelle Harrison at the Henley Centre marketing consultancy agrees: 'Even people who are pushed for time have developed a growing interest in value,' she says, 'regardless of the fact that they have to expend time to get it. Over the past five years, bargain shopping has become a pursuit of the mass affluent. You'll find a lot of middle-class mums in Primark buying multi-packs of pants; it is savvy consumerism. Value has become mainstream and middle-class. In fact, you'll find that posh shoppers are going value and value shoppers are going posh.'

Next door to my local Primark, as if to prove her point, Gap is currently doing sterling business in a capsule collection of dresses by designer Roland Mouret. After a spin around the heaving hangar of the former (I leave with a duvet cover, fitted sheets and a multi-pack of pants), I slip into Gap. The Mouret dresses are there, looking rather exquisite in tomato-red or dove-grey. The assistant approaches and hisses, sotto voce, as if being overheard would cause a stampede: 'You really ought to buy it right now. They're gold dust. These are absolutely the last we'll be getting.' This, lest you forget, is Gap, once the bastion of basics, now a genuine designer destination.

For their part, of course, the value stores have upped their game. We wouldn't boast about our £15 peacoat unless it sat on the enticing tip of a trend. The budget retailers, it seems, have all caught a dose of the Topshops. Those that haven't - C&A, Alders, Littlewoods - are no longer with us. But remember New Look just five years ago? Or Primark? Any supermarket? These places were style vacuums, a polyester zoo of abject nastiness.

Now look. You can get a lacy sashed cocktail dress from F&F Florence at Tesco for £25. Asda's swish fashion - a tartan prom dress for £20, a cocktail ring for £3, a cashmere sweater for £22 - boasts its own TV campaign, fronted by the gorgeous and minted Coleen McLoughlin. Charlotte Church, we hear, prefers Peacocks to Prada. Primark is the scene of infamous bitch-fights over the last polka-dot frock. Fashion editors descend from Sloane Street or Seventh Avenue to prowl the vast plains of Matalan, hunting down the jacquard jackets and cherry-picking the chunky jumpers.

Meanwhile, the design content of what's on offer down here in the bargain basement has never been stronger. Following Stella McCartney's success at H&M last year, you'll find Viktor and Rolf there this season. If you've missed Mouret at Gap, fear not: British Designer of the Year Giles Deacon has just signed up with New Look. What democracy! In a few short years, the fashion landscape has been entirely reshaped, washed away by the flood of available, have-it-all, cheap-as-chips, proper, pukka fashion. As Sarah Walter, fashion consultant at New Look, says, 'Five years ago, we'd never have been able to produce this kind of collection... It's down to sourcing and great relationships with manufacturers. We buy in such volume that fabrics like cashmere don't have to be a luxury any more...'

While many will rejoice at such unexpected egalitarianism entering the fashion arena, there are downsides, too, which chafe at the conscience. As Verdict reports, the constant price-cutting that characterises this booming end of the business has meant shoppers can buy more and more products each year while spending less and less. The average woman bought 51 items of clothing in 2001; in 2006, she hauled home 71. We're shopping for England, shopping for kicks, shopping for dear life.

'I'm so spoiled by newness that I may have to shop every day for the rest of my life.' Jessica Simpson

Forget class, religion, region, age, gender or political persuasion. Today, we aren't even what we eat. We are what we buy. And we buy a lot. Shopping defines us, far more keenly now than when feminist artist Barbara Kruger produced her 1983 work I Shop Therefore I Am (the piece, incidentally, sold for $600,000 last year). One friend of mine told me recently, with only a trace of melancholy, that 'shopping is my only hobby'. She's not alone. It's what we Brits do - on a Saturday, on a Sunday, after work, with the family, with abandon. This, in itself, is nothing new. As Neil McKendrik, John Brewer and JH Plumb noted in their 1983 book The Birth of a Consumer Society: 'The ferocious pursuit of getting and spending has a long history. The feverish pursuit of fashion is just as ancient... But in the past, the acquisitive part of society was a tiny one. Its indomitable pursuit of possessions satisfied more than personal greed and personal whim... It served important social and political functions too [such as the ability to] mark the divinity of a king, to underline the exclusive status of the nobility, or the professional status of lawyers, doctors, and the educated elite.'

In the 21st century, we're all at it. We do it from our armchairs, or while watching TV. Tesco Direct now sells sofas, kitchenware, electricals, cameras, bikes and golf clubs; John Lewis's recent record-breaking figures were underpinned by a 70 per cent rise in online sales. Yet cyber-spending doesn't seem to be putting the brakes on concrete expansion - far from it. The amount of new retail space currently being developed in the UK is the equivalent of 15 Bluewater shopping centres.

'Shopping,' submits Dr Michelle Harrison, 'is a real leisure activity now. Time has become another currency, and we use it to shop - not for efficiency or convenience, but for enjoyment.' At this time of year, of course, shopping truly becomes our national sport. According to business analysts Deloitte, Britons racked up a spend of almost £15bn on Christmas last year, with each of us spending around £310 on presents alone. Station yourself in Oxford Street tomorrow afternoon, and you will see that the eyes of shoppers are the eyes of hawks, darting here and there, window to window, ready for the hot deal, for a new way to boil eggs or an MP3 with a bigger memory. The excitement is palpable; the punters primed and pumped. Economist Richard Thaler called this exhilarating exchange 'transactional utility' - the idea that customers benefit not merely from the purchase alone, but from the financial deal per se, and particularly the difference between the selling price and our internal reference price. Once we've covered the basics of food and shelter, shopping becomes emotional. Intense. As Judith Levine writes in her book Not Buying It, in which she charts a year without purchasing anything beyond absolute necessities, 'Shopping defeats, or at least circumvents, boredom, but not only because it fills idle time. Consumption is an exercise in hope - hope for more happiness, more beauty, more status, more fun.'

A New Yorker cartoon shows a woman standing at a department store counter, asking of the salesperson, 'What would you suggest to fill the dark, empty spaces in my soul?'

Consider for a moment how shopping has infiltrated your life. Every cranny of need and non-need is serviced. House-plant leaf wipes; man purses; George Foreman grills; inflatable dartboards. Think of a whim, a pastime, a festival - ancient or ersatz - and it has been confiscated from common ownership, priced up and stacked on a shelf for us to buy it back. A recent survey found that 62 per cent of dads received a gift from their children on Father's Day in 2005, compared with only six per cent who ever bought a gift for their own father. Think of occasions that once had no commercial value at all, but now require us, by creeping social mandate, to buy a little something to show we care: the last day of school, perhaps, which is now awash with L'Occitane scented candles for the teacher. As a child, I said 'thank you' in two words, not with a boxed set of organic honeys.

Similarly, in the jumble of my children's dressing-up box, you won't find those oddments of Lurex and squashed hats that formed the basis of my playtime theatricals as a child. You'll find a fully-functioning vampire's outfit (Asda), a fairy princess (Woolworth), a Minnie Mouse (Disney) and the entire dramatis personae of The Pirates of the Caribbean. Today, just as we expend valuable time saving negligible sums to unearth bargains online or in those budget stores, the reverse is also true: we're willing to spend easy money where once we might have spent precious time.

The costumes, or whatever other plastic tat we buy, are thus somehow leached of meaning; we don't treasure them, and so we feel able to junk them without skipping a heartbeat. Today, a Christmas tree, by way of topical example, really is just for Christmas - in 2005, you'll recall, the tree du jour was black; this year, as the more astute among you will already know, it's chocolate-brown tinsel, requiring an entirely new family of complementing baubles and hand-carved Norwegian-style wooden gee-gaws imported from the People's Republic of China. In your youth, didn't the Christmas decorations last for generations? Weren't they retrieved from the loft, dusted down, reminisced over, held together with yellowing Sellotape? Didn't your Dad fix the fairy lights, swearing gently at them under his breath? Some still do, of course. But they are an anachronism, like a dining table or making your own pastry from scratch.

And so life becomes a revolving door for consumables. Like you, I have regular clear-outs - of plastic dinosaurs, lampshades, bicycle seats, shelving systems, unread books, CDs still in their cellophane wrap, juggling balls - where I shift the stuff from room to room to attic, and eventually, one ruthless day, to the overfed charity shop up the road. It's the throughput that horrifies me; the waste.

'I think shopping's great. It's not the only thing in the world, but it's fun. I'm hugely motivated by consumerism. I don't think I would have ever got up in the morning if I hadn't wanted to buy something. I think it brings people pleasure.' Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue

Shopping can certainly be stimulating. I've been at it for donkeys' years and could go on for decades. But something - subtle but crucial, for me at least - has been recast. In 1997, I wrote The London Fashion Guide, remarking in the introduction that 'I love to shop. I adore the sheer naughtiness of a splurge, the indulgent pick-me-up of a posh carrier bag, the crisp rustle of tissue wrapping, the buzz of a bargain...'

Today, I'm not so sure. Over the intervening years, much has changed - out there, and within. Like so many green-tinged consumers, I find long-haul air travel increasingly repellent; an SUV seems obscene. For anyone who reads the news and knows the score, shopping - the grabby, greedy shopping where more is more and bigger better - seems vulgar, even offensive. The packaging, the hauling across the planet, the sheer stupidity of a singing Santa when it eventually arrives on these shores... But there's more to it than a simple eco-epiphany: for me, after all these years of fling, bling and kerching, the drugs don't work.

The modern shopping experience may be momentarily thrilling, but it is no longer remotely satisfying; there's little sense of achievement attached to the grand tour of the high-street stores and the romp home with the booty. Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick University argues that, far from fulfilling us, our excess breeds unhappiness as we try unsuccessfully to keep up with the Joneses, or - in our celebrity-saturated age - the Zeta-Joneses. 'Since everyone around us is getting richer and accumulating more at a similar pace,' says Oswald, 'there appears to be no net gain. Also, we habituate: we soon get used to the Ferrari in the drive.' John Stuart Mill long ago recognised that 'Men do not desire to be rich, but richer than other men'; it's the gap that grates. Plenty of terms have been coined to describe this lacuna in our lives: 'luxury fever', 'aspirational gap', or 'affluenza' - defined as 'a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more'. To make up for this sense of loss, and to make up for getting 'bored' with belongings already accumulated, Professor Juliet Schor at Harvard found that people tend to buy more things by way of compensation. The buzz of shopping soon becomes a blip that barely registers; any 'value' is in the act of purchase, the shiny packaging, the sell, while the product itself becomes almost inconsequential (which explains the increasing incidence of 'shopping bulimia' - the binge buying and serial returning that characterises many a British shopping trip).

Here's one shopper, P, aged 34: 'It's that thing where you buy stuff, then leave it in the bag or on a hanger with all the tickets on for weeks and weeks, and then you go off it before you actually ever wear it... I'll stand in queues holding stuff, already knowing I don't want it really, already envisaging how it'll clutter up my life and never get used. Shopping is the most compulsive thing I do. It's not even about whether or not you can afford it. It's about this sickening urge to consume and consume and consume... it is like eating way beyond hunger.'

We do it, in part, because retailing depends as much on repulsion as attraction. Nietzsche long ago wrote that 'Possessions are usually diminished by possession.' It's why last season's wedge heels now look loathsome, whereas this week's beribboned platforms in the window of Kurt Geiger are all but irresistible. Way back in 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen described in his Theory of the Leisure Class the way in which 'the best of our fashions strike us as grotesque' a few months past their prime. He called the phenomenon 'aesthetic nausea' - how once the novelty of the new had evaporated, you barely want to give it house room. Then, he writes, 'We take refuge in a new style... Its futility presently becomes as odious as that of its predecessor; and the only remedy which the law of waste allows us is to seek relief in some new construction, equally futile and equally untenable.'

It's unlikely that today's esteemed fashion editors would put it quite so baldly. But even they are beginning, slowly, to balk at the massive over-consumption that typifies our world, and, very specifically, their corner of it. Here's Lisa Armstrong in the Times: 'While there will always be those who crave status through luxury symbols, increasingly consumers are finding that the best thing about buying something is the anticipation and that ownership itself can often be a drag.' Why, then, do we persist, even though the cupboards and drawers, the lofts of the land, are crying 'enough!'?'s new Toyland microsite features two animated 'renegade elves' called Wally and Marty who encourage children to help them review a parade of toys. Chosen toys are then boxed up and added to a wishlist that can then be e-mailed to adults. As child-users move toys such as a new $20 Bratz doll and a $250 rideable toy Ford Mustang into an animated rocket, the elves announce that 'choosing the toys is only the beginning. You also have to tell someone... If you show us what you want on your wishlist, we'll blast it off to your parents... We'll plead your case.'

What modern child need ever write to Santa when they can get online and go straight to Mammon's mouth? Modern shopping, you see, is easy as a wink. Click a mouse. Express delivery. Customers who bought this item also bought... Amazon brings a bookshop of two million titles into every home. Thirty-four per cent of our Christmas shopping was done online last year. Thunking great catalogues offer us a streamlined way to make snappy purchases. This massive proliferation of choice, the sheer availability of merchandise, has given rise to 'consumer vertigo' - that escalating panic you experience when evaluating the relative merits of a pair of jeans or a pot of coffee, based on its sustainability, organic merits, carbon footprint, calorie content, ethical make-up, advertising slogan, bizarre sizing and how many E numbers were fed to how many rabbits to get it on display in your branch of Tesco.

What's more, we're constantly inundated with new and original things. Look, for instance, at the ship's manifest for the Emma Maersk 3, which sailed from China to Felixstowe last month laden with '1,886,000 Christmas decorations, 40,000 rechargeable batteries, 22,280kg of Vietnam tea, 12,800 MP3 players, 150 tonnes of New Zealand lamb, 10 tonnes of mussels, 138,000 tins of catfood, plus pumpkins, radio-controlled cars, electric guitars and drumsticks, soft toys, pinball machines, potato mashers, slotted spoons, graters, toothpicks, leather sofas, spectacles, pyjamas, soft toys...'

According to the Guardian, it represented 'the largest single consignment of festive cheer ever delivered... the Emma Maersk will soon be on its way back to China,' the reporter continued, 'But instead of carrying toys and electronic gorillas, it will be taking back the detritus of a throwaway Christmas.' Looked at this way, there's very little to cheer about. The cheap and cheerful soon becomes base and worthless if you stop a while and stare.

'Staying on the cheap-as-chips shop subject, I just had a browse through an online catalogue and was surprised to see this Dior 'Rebel' inspired bag for only £6. Six pounds! Can you believe it? You'd think the materials and labour would cost more than £6, but I guess that's the price you pay for sweatshop labour. What are your opinions on sweatshop labour, girls?'
Posting on the Bag Lady website

Well, plenty of us simply ignore it. Don't we? We shut our eyes and open our purses. While many British shoppers gaily recycle yoghurt pots, turn down the thermostat, buy Fairtrade chocolate and compost kitchen waste, we are somehow able to square away the fact that a five-quid handbag smells all wrong, even given the vast economies of scale exercised by our goliath chain stores. We have, if you like, developed a sweatshop blind spot. As non-shopper Judith Levine puts it: 'Would the sweater girl decide not to buy the garments if she knew the connections between them and the worker and the manufacturer and the stockholder and the lobbyist and the World Bank and the President she loathes? I know those connections and I'm still buying a half-dozen pyjamas, made in India, for a total of $59.99...'

In the rush to bag a bargain, plenty of us set aside moral issues that would - outside of the strip-lit realms of the value store - give us pause for thought. 'I think most people who go into Primark have a fair idea of what it is likely to mean for the workers producing the clothes on sale there, but sometimes the bargain-hunting impulse overrides the ethical impulse,' submits Martin Hearson of Labour Behind the Label, a campaigning coalition of development agencies, labour rights groups and trade unions. 'Since people don't have a clear ethical alternative on the high street, it's tempting just to go for the cheapest.' The issues are indeed far from simple. As Hearson points out, 'The word "sweatshop" is misleading. Problems for workers are systemic, so poverty wages, 80-hour working weeks and so on, are everywhere, in all companies' supply chains. There has been progress on some issues, like child labour, and in a limited number of workplaces on, for example, hours of work. But the reality is that in an environment of falling prices, no company is yet doing enough to raise conditions substantially.'

Using information from the retailers themselves and evidence direct from developing countries, the Let's Clean Up Fashion report, published in September by Labour Behind the Label, found that despite meeting minimum wage requirements, 'neither national legal standards nor industry benchmark standards come close to meeting basic needs... the global garment workforce in 2006 is even more tired, underpaid, and unable to reap the benefits of globalisation than it was six years ago...moreover, more and more garments are sourced from countries, such as China, where workers have no freedom of association'. Dr Liu Kaiman of the Institute of Contemporary Observation in Shenzen, speaks for many when he tells LBL: 'The retailers and their suppliers are playing an elaborate game. They only want to reassure consumers, not to improve conditions.'

The companies deny this, but sadly it doesn't take much to reassure us, to soothe us into submission. In an attempt to establish the story behind those £6 handbags, LBL wrote to all of the UK's major high-street retailers and all members of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI). It received no response from, among others, River Island and Peacocks; it says Primark and Arcadia is 'dragging its feet' on tackling workers' rights issues. (Primark says it 'has made a public commitment to monitoring and progressively improving the conditions of the people who make products for Primark.') The report said Asda is 'resting on its laurels', accusing them of being 'more interested in ticking the right boxes to stave off criticism than they are in achieving actual results for their workers'. Asda, part of the Wal-Mart group, counter that their factories are regularly inspected and all comply with the ETI-based code. Tesco, M&S, TK Maxx, Zara and New Look were commended for 'decent steps in some areas', while only Gap and Next have been 'engaging more seriously' with the issues raised.

Hearson argues strongly, however, that boycotting the worst offenders would be detrimental for all: 'Boycotting only harms the workers further by costing them their jobs,' he says. 'What's needed is a shift from passive consumerism to active - buy from your favourite shops, but tell them that you care, and interrogate them on what they're really doing.' What the fashion and homeware industry needs is a shakedown of the type visited by consumers upon the food sector in the wake of BSE. We now ask probing questions about the provenance of our burgers. So why not our handbags?

Dr Michelle Harrison at the Henley Centre certainly detects a change coming in our attitude to shopping: 'Going forward, I suspect that shoppers will continue to feel "I'm entitled", but they will begin to feel guilty about overdoing it. Consumption is becoming laced with guilt. Hey, we're a long way from women wanting fewer shoes, but I can see changes in the way we feel about shopping. We'll ask more questions.'

Professor Oswald is more radical: he believes that 'there's now overwhelming evidence to suggest we're stuck in a happiness plateau. Sheer acquisition won't help. There needs to be some co-ordinated, collective way of slowing consumption down across society. And it's starting to happen. Look at David Cameron: who would have thought 20 years ago that a young Tory leader - and a whole swathe of hard-bitten economists - would be talking about promoting well-being rather than wealth?'

But the changes, if they come, won't be wrought from above. They will happen individually, incrementally, progressively - every time we fall under the spell of a carousel of teaspoons or a tartan prom dress at Asda. Simply stopping shopping won't get us anywhere; but we could think a little more and gorge a little less.

We could, perhaps, aim for a 'steady state economy', the term coined by former World Bank economist Herman E Daly, now a professor at the University of Maryland. As Judith Levine writes in her book, Daly argues for a 'relatively slow flow of well-made, durable, energy-efficient goods, rather than the breathless production of low-quality, fast-obsolescing and energy-hungry ones - for example, more bicycles and fewer Hummers...'

It sounds provocative, doesn't it? Do-able? Well, I'll try if you will. No more new tea towels for a while, then. No more desperate trolley dashes around Matalan. But when Giles Deacon's collection arrives at New Look, I'll be there, leading the stampede, elbowing you out of the way to get at the goodies. It's only natural, after all.