MADNESS OF CROWDS
Driving back south on the M4O from a Christmas spent in the Hyperborean Vale of Pershore that included walking for miles along the banks of a frozen River Avon, I was struck by this inverse correlation: as the temperature rose and the snow turned to slush, so the motorway traffic slowed to a glacial pace, slabs of family sheathed in steel nuzzling together until somewhere north of Banbury there were three full lanes of emotional pack ice. The same thing happened before the Oxford exit, and then again in White City as we groaned towards central London.
Sheer weight of traffic is the usual explanation for such paralysis, especially between Christmas and New Year when the young folk trek from one encampment of static oldies to the other. But as we bickered along the Western Avenue it occurred to me that all these tailbacks were being massively quantified by some very simple percentages: the 25 , 50 and even 75 per cent being slashed off consumer durables by the big retailers in their sales, and the 2.5 percentage points soon to be whacked on to VAT by George "Heir to a Home Furnishings Fortune" Osborne.
The annual mass hysteria that is the post-Christmas sales has got earlier and earlier in the past quarter- century. Time was that a few hardy consumers would hunker down in their sleeping bags on the tundra of Oxford Street to see out the old year and usher in a brave new one of high discounts. But then the sales took a leap backward to the week immediately after Christmas, and now, with the link between physical presence and bargain- hunting putatively severed by the internet, many retailers start their January sales on, gulp, Christmas Eve.
Feeding frenzy
Naturally, this represents an effective barrier to such discounting frenzy, for the premium purchasing potlatch of Christmas gifting and the loss-leading, discounted lunacy that follows it must never, ever actually touch. For such a thing to happen would be tantamount to an outbreak of crowd sanity, as household upon household decides to wait until the sales before buying its Christmas presents. Capitalism, which, far from being based on rationally aggregated cost-benefit analyses, is in fact a form of magic that depends on the smoke of addiction and the mirror-shiny surfaces of marketing, would very quickly collapse if the strict timing that governs the shopping ritual were so vitiated.
You might' ve thought that the atavistic practice of bagging cheap big-box consumer electronics on foot -which is essentially the stalking of stag or wild boar in pantomimic form - would barely survive online shopping, but my suspicion is that the two forms of hysteria actually feed off one another. On Christmas Eve, sitting at his computer beside the expensively wrapped and costly gifts, the crazed shopper waits all a-tremble for the moment when he can jab the button and score a cheaper hit. However, there's always something unsatisfying about virtual buying, so that a day or so later, with his 5O-inch highdefinition TV yet to be delivered, he hies himself to the high street to fight tooth and claw for exactly the same item.
Self improvement
Still, I don't wish to leave you with the impression that we Selfs are entirely deaf to the mandible -clatter of this day of the locusts. In the run-up to Christmas there was some talk around the breakfast table of getting a new television before the VAT hike (our current sets are 15 and 25 years old, respectively). To begin with, the logistics of co-ordinating car availability with the sales were mulled over, but soon enough someone pointed out that we might as well get one online. Then, as the hours ebbed away before the dreaded 20 per cent rate, it emerged that we couldn't even be bothered to do this, because, as some evil anarchist pointed out: "What does the saving really amount to on a �400 telly? Basically, it's a tenner."
Dear- dear, with consumer defeatism like this, the British economy will never get the jump-start it needs. Besides, we really did need a flat-screen TV, because our old ones are ludicrously curvy, imparting an entirely spurious impression of a similarly well-rounded external world, rather than the one we live in, which is savagely compressed into two dimensions of price and demand.
[Author Affiliation]
Next week: Real Meals
newstatesman.com/ writers/will.self
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