Guest Blog by Mary Atkins: SPOILT FOR CHOICE

The Mall, the grand temple of consumerism, promises us so much satisfaction. As we pace the avenues of shiny windowed retailers our senses are aroused with trinkets, fashion and style. The Malls are open seven days a week and we can even indulge in shopping from the comfort of our own bed thanks to television and the internet.  A bombardment of clever marketing feeds our desire to ‘shop till we drop.’

Nearly two decades ago the Chicago Tribune commented ‘We've become a nation measuring out our lives in shopping bags and nursing our psychic ills through retail therapy.’

So does retail therapy and its cornucopia of abundance make us happy, well according to the studies by American psychologists David Myers and Robert Lane this modern day consumer bonanza often leads to depression and feelings of loneliness. Barry Schwartz author of the book The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less asserts that as consumers we have too many choices, too many decisions that make us confused and anxious and leaves us too little time to do what really is important. 

He believes we are happier when we have less choice citing an interesting study by Columbia and Stanford Universities that found that when participants were faced with a smaller rather than larger array of chocolates, they were actually more satisfied with their tasting.

Maybe this explains the modern day phenomenon of our love affair with branding and our fascination with ridiculously priced items.  A brand, especially a glossy luxury brand, is like some great retail God sign that the BRAND is the key to consumer nirvana. Then for the shoe fetish amongst us, it seems the only way our consumer ethos can be enriched is by the purchase of a pair of Jimmy Choo or Manolo Blahnik shoes.

Compare this with the simpler time of my life as a child and young woman, where one pair of shoes, commensurate with our growth, and one pair of slippers was the norm. ‘Make do and mend’ was the catch cry for the British people in wartime and post war England.

When rationing was eventually dissembled fourteen years after it began in 1954 the lesson of thriftiness had well and truly been learned. My father still mended our shoes, we grew our own vegetables, leftovers were never left to mould, every piece of the carcass of meat or poultry was used. ‘Built in obsolescence’ and ‘de-clutter’ and ‘keeping up with Jones’s’ was not to be found in any dictionary. Nothing was thrown out. We recycled and made do.

But so many everyday foods and goods we did without. All my clothes were hand-me-downs. I ate my first piece of steak, a banana and chocolate when I was eight.  A fresh egg, rather than powdered egg was a luxury.

Did these limited choices make us happier? Life was definitely simpler and shopping was about meeting our primary needs rather than wants. There was no acquaintance with a shiny new whatever to stir the covetousness of our unfilled wants. We accepted that this was how it was and dreamed of better days when rationing was over and we could indulge freely.

Frugality and abundance are the opposite ends of the spectrum both equal in their impact.  Too little dampens the spirit and too much sends us skittering out of control with a desire for more and more.

In Vietnam the market traders have coined an expression for the tourist customers  - ‘You see, you like. You like, you buy. You buy, you have. You have, you like,’ which sums up today’s pop shopping culture of our desire for instant gratification.  But if we absorb the conclusion from the psychologists’ studies that too much choice makes us confused and anxious we see clearly that real happiness lies in an ability to live more simply. 

Ideally it is about creating a balance; understanding that there is a difference between a spur of the moment ‘that’s nice’ buy and a genuine want - a quality choice that will nurture us.

 

Mary Atkins

19 January 2015