The Retail Experience

Some would say we no longer ‘go shopping’. Today instead we enjoy ‘a retail experience’! When ‘shopping’, we would traditionally have entered the vending emporium to find ourselves confronted by an enormous wooden counter impeding our ingress and barricading the wondrous merchandise concealed within the mysterious and multitudinous drawers , cupboards, chests and boxes against prying eyes and wandering fingers. In reverential silence, this veritable line of defence would have been ably manned by a minor army of soft voiced marionettes suitably outfitted in sombre black, discretely guarding a relatively small number of attired mannequins and displayed low-cost items. As though on castors, these marionettes would move silently around their work areas, busily sorting, folding, checking and otherwise arranging the items in their charge as though each were precious and covetable. In low tones, we would have imparted our requests and desires to these assistants, who would then actually serve us, bringing us their most suitable items for polite inspection or fitting, for service was paramount and the customer was always right.
Today we are free to rummage among the merchandise, mauling it at will as it hangs limply from display rails like discarded washing; or worse, lies dustily on the floor where it has been carelessly dropped. Scurrying assistants bring ever more armfuls of goods to display on evermore metal display racks, all in the scramble to part us from our hard earned and make profit. And all to a never-ending, ear-splitting, deafening cacophony of sound that they are pleased to call ‘music’. Some stores, however, manage to settle their retail activities somewhere between the two extremes and these probably do actually provide an ‘enjoyable retail experience’. Or perhaps, heaven forbid, I’m just getting old and grumpy.