Confessions of a shopaphobic

When I was writing about hand me downs the other week, I made a quick mental calculation about my own annual expenditure on clothes and I realised that I only bought three items of clothing in 2009 and 2010 so far. While I would love to claim that this was in aid of saving the planet, it is actually because I hate shopping. I really cannot understand the appeal and I go to the mall only when I really have to. This weekend, however, I was dragged against my will into the Southside Centre and (even worse) into Primark by my 12-year old stepdaughter. Under normal circumstances (ie: the need for a replacement school skirt) I’d find an excuse to wait outside while she grabs what she needs and waits for ages in the queue to part with her fiver, but this time she convinced me to go in.

My God it is a terrifying experience.

The amount of tat that you can buy for two or three quid is just extraordinary. You can’t help but think of sweatshops when you look at the piles of cheap shirts, but whether the clothes are made in sweatshop conditions or not (and it’s important to note that I have no knowledge of poor working practices at Primark), it is the culture that comes with the cheap fashion phenomenon that is the real problem.

My stepdaughter loves Primark. “It is so cheap, you can just wear it once or twice and then chuck it” she said. This made my heart sink. I tried to talk to her about the environmental impacts of the clothes that she was buying but it was not the conversation she wanted to be having on a Saturday afternoon. And this girl is no tween airhead, in fact she is a very smart, cool kid, who has actually studied sweatshops in school, but while she really does care about the state of the world, what matters most in her life is her friends and their common interests, and what 12-year olds like to do in their spare time is shop.

So, maybe she’ll grow out of it... Not if my favourite futurist Ronald Inglehart is to be believed. His hypothesis is that individual values (eg. materialism) are embedded as a child reaches adulthood, and very little changes thereafter. He says: “The relationship between socioeconomic environment and value priorities is not one of immediate adjustment: a substantial time lag is involved because, to a large extent, one’s basic values reflect the conditions that prevailed during one’s preadult years”. So if shopping is the most common cultural activity for a kid during their early socialisation years, their future as avid materialists is pretty much set in stone.

So what can we do as parents or activists to stem the tide of materialism and help kids see that there really isn’t the need to have more and more stuff? How do we help them see the long-term consequences of buying clothes and then chucking them after a couple of washes, especially when retailers like Primark are so good at catering to their needs? I don’t have the answers. I’m not sure I know what gave me my distinct fear of shopping. Actually yes I do... I worked on the cashdesk at H&M in Oxford Street for the best part of my teenage years. Seeing shopping from the other side of the counter must have put me off it for life.

That’s what my stepdaughter needs then – a job in Primark.