Retailisation

The Here, There and Everywhere of Retail

Francesca de Châtel, Robin Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135476083
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

Investigates the current state of selling, whether this is groceries, politicians, information or motorcars. Unlike any other phenomenon, retailization reflects the complexity and diffusion of information processes and the media in the online market. The authors explore the all-pervasive nature of retail in the physical world, the virtual world and the peripheral spaces in between.
Coverage includes:
interviews with Asda, MOMA, the Tate Modern, Wal-Mart, Sony, Habitat, Manchester United and Volkswagen, while Bill Mitchell, Dean of Architecture at MIT, architects Jon Jerde, Rem Koolhas and Ben van Berkel, as well as David Peek, psychologist behind the Bluewater Shopping Mall, are all individually interviewed.

Chapter 1—

The speed of choice: asses’ values?

‘Well, but what did you buy this mass of things for?’ said the Princess, smiling, and handing her husband a cup of coffee.
‘One goes for a walk, one looks in a shop, and they ask you to buy. “Erlaucht, Excellenz, Durchlaucht?” Directly they say “Durchlaucht” I can’t hold out— and ten thalers are gone.’
‘It’s simply from boredom,’ said the Princess.
‘Of course it is. Such boredom, my dear, that one doesn’t know what to do with oneself.’
‘How can you be bored, Prince? There’s so much that’s interesting now in Germany,’ said Marya Eugenyevna.
‘But I know everything that’s interesting: the plum soup I know and the pea sausages I know. I know everything.’

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina³

‘Could we? I mean, it is nearly lunchtime.’
‘10:30, Patsy!’
‘Um-hum?’
‘Well, look, we can do Harvey Nichols quickly.’
Patsy and Eddie discuss time, speed and shopping, Absolutely

Fabulous

Imagine for a moment that you are in your giant out-of-town local supermarket or mall. You know its layout well because you have been coming here to shop for years and you have found everything you need to buy for the next week in record time. The stately procession of you and your family with your piled-high trolley filled with your standard weekly shopping hasn’t been derailed by sudden excursions to unusual store aisles featuring new, highly advertised, impeccably branded luxury products, and the flow of fellow-shoppers is as logical as your own. Nobody u-turns to pick up the missed toothpaste or hesitates over the cheese counter, or drops a child off their trolley. You haven’t been seduced by any special offers, the children haven’t insisted on having the latest chocolate bar that is tied into a blockbuster movie and your partner has resisted arguing over the merits of Chilean Merlot against German lager—you’ve bought both without friction. You haven’t been immersed by the vastness of the space and fallen into a kind of dream state of irrational purchasing, nor become so irritated that you have missed half the things you meant to buy.

And so now it is time to queue to pay. Speed is probably the last thing to expect from now on. Frustration, anger, irritation, dreams of robotic pay-out till minders: these are our thoughts. And when we have finally signed our credit card or handed over our cash, packed our groceries and left the store do we feel that life will quicken again? No, we have the car park and traffic to navigate, the bus to wait for, the taxi to holler at, the heavy bags to carry home. No, retail is not a speedy experience. Not unless, that is, you shop at 3 a.m. in the morning.

Now imagine instead that you are at home. Or at work. Or in your car. Or on a plane, at sea, walking in the Lake District or skiing down the Rocky Mountains—anywhere but in the supermarket, in fact. You are still wanting to fill your fridge and kitchen cabinets at home with the provisions to keep you fed for the next week, but you haven’t got the time —or you are not in the right place—to make the purchases from your usual store. Or you simply don’t want to be there.

So, instead of the 20-minute trawl of the supermarket aisles to gather your groceries followed by the 20-minute queue to pay, you use a computer or a personal digital assistant or a mobile phone to access an online grocery store. You have a standard order of provisions, which you’ve previously set up. So now you click on the purchase button, select a time that is convenient to you for delivery of your goods, add your credit card details, and then sit back and enjoy all the time you have saved. Four hours or two weeks later (it is all up to you) a delivery truck arrives, someone carries your goods inside and your weekly shopping is complete. The result: no queuing, no stress, no traffic—just a slightly higher bill to pay for the service and delivery. E-commerce or electronic retailing, digital home shopping is king: speedy and needful of your needs, not those of the retailer.

Simple. Except that right now the majority of us are far more likely to find ourselves in that checkout queue than online and buying goods. We know we waste time in shops, particularly supermarkets, but we don’t yet trust the Internet to deliver to us reliably. Many of us don’t have delivery services in our area yet. We don’t all have Internet access (though the growth figures for the Web suggest that it will be as ubiquitous as the telephone within a decade). Or computers. We aren’t always, or ever, able to say when we will be home to receive a delivery. But we all would love to save time, because none of us ever has a perfect supermarket experience. We’d all love to cut out this unnecessary trip, this time-waste (unless we are looking for more than frozen peas when we visit our supermarket; for example, we could be looking for love—people do).

Now imagine that you are thinking about buying a business suit, a party dress, a swimsuit for the holidays, a new sofa—or even a new home. Again, as with our supermarket odyssey, there are many options, both physical and virtual. Again, though we are still strapped for time, we will probably find some, one way or another, to ensure we make a smart purchasing decision. We will, perhaps, visit a store that has many of the brands we like. We will per haps visit one branded store we have bought from before. We could visit, say, a Selfridges or Macy’s department store or a particular Topshop. We could visit a Habitat or a Crate and Barrel store where we know a member of the staff and we trust them. If we are looking for a house we could visit one estate agency, or every agency on the relevant high street. We could talk to the person we bought our last house from and ask advice about the market. We will have our favourite stores, and the most convenient ones; stores that are likely to have something, at least.

Or we could visit all of the above online—search through the ranges of £600 suits or £2,000 sofas, or £200,000 homes—and make a decision. That decision is twofold, and is core to the decisions we investigate in this book. Do we negate time and space and buy the object online using a credit card, waiting for delivery by the agency we have bought from? Do we make a choice by researching all the available information and opinion to guide us, find out how to buy what we want using the Internet, then purchase it in physical space? Or do we almost make a decision, then visit the most convenient store, mall, or agency to make the final purchase even if the choices are not perfect? We could just want to buy a pair of trousers, or just want to go shopping. In this case, research, the elimination of time and space, and any other considerations about improving our chances of a rational, best-buy experience all but vanish.

All options have their fans. Retailers would love us to buy leather sofas or linen Armani jackets online. After all, if everyone bought their luxury purchases online there would be no need for the high street. There would be no need for retailers to spend so much money on buildings and interior decorations. There would be no need constantly to refresh the window displays. There would be no need to employ all those expensive, temperamental staff. That hasn’t happened yet, and won’t for two reasons.

First, as consumers we still feel a little unsure about e-commerce and large, luxury purchasing—particularly after the first generation of dot.coms and websites imploded in such spectacular ways, leaving us apparently with only eBay and Amazon as the safe, sure bet. Sure, people have bid $25,000 for art online; sure they buy cars online; sure, they scoop up great auction bargains online at enormous prices. But what if the dress we’ve bought online doesn’t feel right when we’ve got it on? What if the pixilated colours of the sofa or car aren’t true on the website? What if the necklace isn’t exactly as it is photographed? It is a lot of money that we are spending on this luxury item, after all.

With simpler purchases we will suspend our disbelief a little, but not with these complex choices. That’s why books and CDs have proved such an allure online: we know what we are getting when we buy Martin Amis or Harry Potter from amazon.com—we are getting the same thing as we would if we visited Waterstone’s or Barnes & Noble bookshops. Except that it might be a little cheaper, and we will have to wait a few days before we can read it. In which case there is usually a bookshop somewhere around to buy from straight away.

The same is true with computers—we don’t test-drive computers before we buy them. We research which chips we want inside, what software we need and thus what capacity of machine we need. We would and could buy computers or software online— which is why Dell computers have been so successful with their e-commerce-enabled website. It is when we are thinking about ourselves and how a purchase could change us—when we think about buying that perfect suit or dress, that car or house—that we’re more likely to go and try it physically. We want to look at ourselves in a mirror and sometimes ask the opinion of someone else—a retailer or a friend—before we hand over our money.

Curiously, given its growing influence and impact, the wired world has failed to seduce us when it comes to the pleasures of random retail: we will not buy on impulse online in the way we often do in a store. The textures and metaphors of online shops are those of ease and efficiency, not of sophisticated, immersive experiences such as we find increasingly in the high street and mall.

This all boils down to a simple series of questions. Do we have time to make the most rational retailing decisions when we need or want to shop, or will we use filters to screen the myriad of options we now have? Will these filters be information sources, other people, or the amount of time we have? Will we use technology or visit the most efficient (or entertaining) new forms of retail experience to curtail the normal processes of Saturday afternoon queuing, instant decisions made in the heat of the moment or simply in irritation or because we want to buy something ? Will we use the virtual, the physical, or a combination of the two to buy the things that define us? Will we keep going to shops, or will they begin to come to us? Actually, they have come already. Home is where we escaped retail once; now it is becoming the perfect immersive environment. In a nirvana economy for retail we would be able to shop 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There would be no such thing as no time to choose, because we would have options all the time. Well, now we are entering a time when this dream—however bleak it might seem to some—appears to be possible. As each year passes, and often faster, barriers to our being able to shop are crumbling.

In the physical world we have few religious or political impediments any longer—how quickly did Sunday become a day of retail rather than rest? We can now travel far further than ever before to find what we want. We now have many all-night stores to service those must-have last minute needs, and —even if we are frightened of venturing out at 3 a.m.—retail is now in our homes via almost all of the technologies with communications facilities: welcome to the virtual world. So now it is all up to us.

We have let retail surround us because it makes our way of living easier: many of us lead busy lives where every minute counts. Where once we would tolerate the slow, we now value the fast— whether we term this ‘business efficiency’ whether we must be first to the market or die; or whether we merely believe and perceive ourselves never to have enough time because we are so often being told so—we demand things now rather than then. We demand speed because of the increasing demands on our time: long hours of work, long hours of travel to work, the strains of working from home, mobile working, relearning for new jobs, our ‘time rage’. In a world of low certainty about anything, from our jobs to what’s actually good on television, the virtues of patience and calm are losing out to the efficiencies of an on-demand world. We enter a McDonald’s and expect to be eating a Big Mac within 90 seconds. We use public transport and quickly decide—if we can afford it (and sometimes when we cannot)—that a car will be more effective. We send an email, where once we would have written a letter, and expect a reply within hours, not days. We visit a shopping mall because everything we want is located in a single environment where once we would happily have traversed high streets and side roads for hours to find what we want.

Some of us use websites to compare the prices of everything from jeans and cars to insurance policies and medicines because we don’t have time to shop around any more. We go on time-management courses where we learn to prioritise our workloads, to project manage not just our work, but our lives. We want mission statements, not complex documents about ambiguity. We want one-page summaries, not 600-page directories. We want to defeat time and speed through knowledgeable choice. We want literally everything. But most of all we want control in a world spinning out of control.⁴

Information

Despite the appeal of the purely random shopping experience and the overt fact that we can seemingly now shop any time, day or night, there are many of us who would like to feel we have all or at least some of the information available about goods—be it about Harry Potter’s latest wizard war or about the resolution and Internet facilities of a particular wide-screen television new to the market— before we make a purchase. Most things we can buy come with promotional literatures that connote information: the specifications of all technological purchases from cameras to televisions and computers; the catalogues and glossy images produced by car manufacturers; the dense brochures that underpin mortgages and insurance policies; the texts that augment striking advertising images in newspapers and magazines.

Then there is the centralised, polyglot, information dreamscape that is the media itself. Our media is now about far more than information, news and comment—it is about reflecting us, our lifestyles, our needs. The exponential growth of news outlets through television, radio and the Internet has to an extent commoditised news —we find things out however we can from radio, television, newspapers, the Internet, or from people who have consumed one or more of these channels. Thus, it is in the realm of how useful media is to us that we make our choices of purchase. A newspaper that is full of stories of soap stars and sex scandals is of little use to the merchant banker trying to buy a Swiss pharmaceutical company, the Financial Times of little use to a McDonald’s worker in the borders of Scotland. Consequently, a newspaper is now both a record of a news event, such as September 11, and also a take on that news, which appeals to, or shapes, our take on the world. In fact the papers are now much more than this concept of targeted news and analysis: each in its way recommends travel destinations, clothes, Internet sites, insurance policies and banks. And specialised magazines take this ‘educational element’⁵ farfurther, with tips on every part of their editorial remit—be it high fashion or graphics software for the computer.

Thus media has a far closer relationship with retail than it might at first appear to—with the exception, largely, of the BBC, there is no longer a sense that one newspaper or television channel is the agency of public ‘record’ and thus somehow beyond retail’s murky grip. In fact we can say that most newspapers are now, during heavy promotional seasons such as early autumn, agencies merely of free CDs rather than ‘record’, and that’s about as good as it gets. Instead they are—to an extent—about editing our consumer choices, giving us information, but from a highly specific position, one that we may not totally agree with.

In an era of consumer choice...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowlegments
• Introduction
• 1 The speed of choice: asses’ values?
• 2 Through the looking glass
• 3 Science, enchantment and the voyeur
• 4 Bricks, clicks and tricks
• 5 A house is not a home
• 6 Here, there and everywhere—peripheral space
• 7 Beyond the product—virtual services
• 8 Burn baby, burn
• 9 Spaced out—the politics of anti-retail
• 10 Retailisation visions
• Notes
• Index