Stay classy, WH Smith!

This is a set of fridge magnets. It’s on sale in the branch of WH Smith on the main concourse on Manchester Piccadilly railway station. This display is helpfully located between the books for children and the soft drinks and sweets. It’s on a low rack, just about at eyeball level for your average six-year-old. It’s tacky and crass and totally inappropriate, and the individual who decided to display it there, in the area of the store where children are most likely to see it, pretty much has to be genuinely stupid.

It’s not, actually, precisely the word itself that bothers me. I certainly can’t claim that I never use it myself, although I do wince when I hear it used, as it often is, as either punctuation or a substitute for the word ‘very’. I don’t have a problem seeing it in print either, and I’m not particularly offended by it – but the word itself, here, is only part of the point.

What I do find offensive is the idea that a profanity with potent layers of meaning attached to it, that a significant number of people still consider to be an absolute taboo – it’s a word that, for example, I have never ever heard my mother use – should be devalued to the point where it can be plastered all over a set of tacky fridge magnets and put on sale in a newsagent’s shop between a shelf full of books for children and a display of sweets and Coca-Cola. I don’t have a problem, as I said, with the word itself – but context is everything, and in this context, it’s tasteless. Words, including this one, exist to be used – but words this strong need to be treated with respect.

Can’t spell? Go and work for Waterstones!

Here, for your reading pleasure, is a selection of the staff recommendation cards on display on bookshelves in Waterstones in the Manchester Arndale shopping centre:

Psycodelic?!

Oops, we lost an N.

They had a pile of spare hyphens in the stockroom, and they had to use them somewhere…

…and that letter E just refuses to behave itself.

See? There’s an evil extra letter E lurking in the store that’s clearly determined to insert itself into as many cards as possible.

Finally, here’s the apostrophe that the company removed from their corporate name at the beginning of this year. Obviously, it refuses to go away.

I was with a friend; we were in there for about fifteen minutes, we certainly didn’t go into the shop intending to poke fun at their signs, and without really looking we found about ten cards containing horrible spelling mistakes. Since we only browsed through a fairly small section of the store, it’s almost certainly fair to assume that there are more. Presumably the branch’s management approves these materials; if head office aren’t embarrassed, they should be. This is sub-GCSE English, and to allow this kind of weapons-grade illiteracy to be part of a merchandising display at all, never mind in a bookshop, is inexcusable.

It’s also, to be fair, not at all what I expect from Waterstones. In other branches, the standard of English on display on these cards is usually impeccable. This, however, is sloppy, lazy, and thoroughly unprofessional.

Of chickens, eggs and compact discs.

I spent half an hour in HMV in Manchester earlier. I’d got a gift card burning a hole in my pocket, so I went in to browse. I left empty-handed.

I can’t, off the top of my head, remember the last time I bought a CD in a shop. True, that’s partly because my tastes in music tend towards the obscure, and partly because it’s so easy to order online. But shopping online is a relatively new thing for me, and it goes against the grain. I do it, basically, because I don’t have any other choice.

I never went to record shops with my parents. That dates me, doesn’t it? “Record shops”? Classical music was always playing in our house when I was a child – I think our radio would have broken if you’d have tried to tune it to any station other than Radio 3 – and I learned about it from my Dad, who would talk to my brother and I about whatever he was listening to. He taught us about his favourite composers, about the different parts in a choir, about the different instruments in an orchestra, and my brother and I – neither of us musical prodigies in early childhood – could distinguish the various instruments in a symphony orchestra by the time we were five or six years old, simply because my Dad’s music (along with the news, the weather forecast and Gardener’s World) was the soundtrack we grew up with. Pop music only happened for me when I was given a radio of my own, and then a cassette player; the tapes I had were mostly purchased from Woolworths, because neither parent was prepared to enter the sort of record shop where loud rock music would be playing over the PA.

Then I went to grammar school. All of a sudden, at age 11, I was travelling back and forth through the centre of a very large city every day. With nobody looking over my shoulder, provided I arrived home at a given time with no visible scars or blemishes, I was free to enter such forbidden temples of sin as HMV and Our Price. I discovered all kinds of music in those places, and I still, now, listen to a lot of the stuff I listened to then. Not just mainstream pop music either – I bought records by Thomas Dolby, Depeche Mode and the Pet Shop Boys, yes, but I also bought cast and concept recordings of musicals, starting with Chess and moving very quickly into (I wince slightly as I type this) the Lloyd Webber oeuvre, and from there to (less wincingly) Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Stephen Sondheim. I discovered all of these things in mainstream record shops in a large provincial city – trips to London, in my early teenage years, were rare, and mostly did not involve shopping of any kind. Later on, when I was about 16, I was allowed to make day trips to go to the theatre in London from my grandmother’s house in Suffolk; on one of those trips, I discovered Dress Circle, and my interest in (for want of a better word) showtunes began to develop into the scary obsessive geek streak that those who know and tolerate me have just about put up with ever since.

I still shop at Dress Circle whenever I’m in London, and I order online with them from time to time, but the point is, all of this began at HMV. And yet, this afternoon, in HMV, there was nothing much I wanted, and not all of my musical tastes are that obscure. The thing is, as online music shopping has grown, ordinary bricks-and-mortar retail has contracted. The classical music department in the main HMV in Manchester is about a third the size it was eighteen months ago. The soundtracks section (blech, the records I buy are cast recordings, not soundtracks) has been decimated. Almost none of the music I discovered there as a teenager is available there any longer. Without the ability to shop online, I don’t know where the sort of geeky, obsessive teenager I was would discover that music – or any music, classical or pop, that sits outside the broad mainstream – today. And even then – it’s certainly not as if there’s no mainstream pop or classical music that I’d be interested in buying, but the things I was interested in this afternoon were a third cheaper as downloads or from Amazon.

It’s a vicious circle, of course, and a huge amount of newsprint has been devoted to it over the past several years. I’ve worked in retail, and I understand the economics – every square foot of retail floorspace has to generate a certain amount of sales revenue per week. Retail space is expensive, managements have a duty to shareholders, they have to stock whatever generates the most profit, and it’s not feasible to keep items as stock that will only turnover every eight to twelve weeks. I don’t have a huge amount of money to throw around on leisure purchases, but I’m more than happy, with the money I do have, to pay a little extra to support an independent specialist retailer. Unfortunately, where I live and for the kinds of music I like, there aren’t any. Within a 15-mile radius of my home, my choice is essentially restricted to various branches of HMV, plus the limited selections available at Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys and WH Smith. The same goes for books, more or less – the choice is between Waterstone’s (owned by HMV), or the limited selection of titles carried in supermarkets, or shopping online. There are a few independents left, but the only one convenient for where I live is a tiny village bookshop that carries only the most limited selection of stock. I buy something from them every few months because I want them to stay in business, but the bulk of my money goes elsewhere. Once upon a time, when I wanted/needed something that wasn’t kept as stock in my local bookshop or record shop, I’d ask them to get it for me. These days, it’s easier, quicker and probably cheaper to get it online; I’m sentimental about independent book and music shops, and am prepared to pay a premium to use them, but I’m not, I’m afraid, remotely sentimental about the HMV group. In chain stores, for mainstream items, I shop on price. It’s not as if HMV, these days, delivers anything resembling customer service. Waterstone’s are a little better, but not much.

There’s an upside to the proliferation of online stores, of course. Without leaving my desk, I can get things that were never available in this country anyway. I can go online and find music by, say, Maurane or Luce Dufault (I have a weakness for odd Francophone pop singers), pay with a card, and the CD drops through the letterbox a week or so later. Once upon a time, I only bought that stuff on holiday in France or Québec. When I worked in London, I’d visit Dress Circle most weeks, and usually buy something; they always did mail order, but it’s easier with a computer, and I can get anything they sell and have it sent to me anywhere in the world. When I started down the tortuous road that, please God, will some day lead to a PhD, online booksellers like Amazon were in their infancy, and their reach was limited in both Canada and the UK. I’d regularly find myself scouring Toronto, London, Manchester, New York for research material, in the form of both books and recordings. It took a lot of time. I’ve spent days and days chasing materials that I could, now, find and buy online in minutes, probably for less than I paid then. On one level, I could view that as having been a big waste of time and money, but here’s the thing: it was fun. Amazon is efficient and easy, but it isn’t fun.

Somehow, the ease with which I can buy books and music online doesn’t appease my inner over-excitable geek, the one who eagerly tears the cellophane wrapper off a new CD and reads the liner notes all the way home on the train. I love the tactile experience of rummaging through racks of CDs in a shop. I love independent, eccentric record and book shops run buy people who buy stock according to their personal taste, rather than via some sales database mandated by a marketing division in a head office miles away. I love picking up an unexpected find, taking a risk, and buying it. That risk, and the sense of discovery that goes with it, doesn’t happen on Amazon, where my shopping is driven by a search engine. I look for something, I find it, I either buy it or I don’t. There’s no sense of discovery, because I go there to look for specific items. And, of course, I’m part of the problem, even though I see this as a problem – as the chain stores orient their stock lines ever more aggressively towards the mainstream, I take my money elsewhere. Because I’m taking my money elsewhere, as is anybody else who’s looking for music that’s marketed outside a narrow core product range, the narrow core product range contracts even further. I love technology, and I love the fact that I carry around with me, in my backpack, a device that’s loaded with hundreds of  albums covering more or less the entire spectrum of my musical taste, rather than a Walkman and half-a-dozen tapes – but I don’t know where a twelve-year-old living outside London or New York, today, would go to find all the music I discovered at that age twenty-five years ago. I don’t know whether the convenience of being able to find anything I might need so easily is worth the loss of that potential for discovery.

Credit, crunched – or, the bill that keeps on billing.

I think I’ve found the mail order company of the damned.

I’m not going to name them. I’m also not going to use them again. All I wanted to do was to buy a couple of shirts. Shopping for clothes is not something I enjoy, so I looked online, found some shirts I liked on special offer (3 for the price of 2), and tried to buy them.

Foolish, foolish man.

I chose three shirts (two denim, one corduroy – we can discuss my absolute lack of anything resembling fashion sense later), added them to the cart, and tried to check out. This is where the fun began. I entered all the details I was asked for – not, at this point, including any kind of bank card information – and clicked ‘confirm’. The next screen told me that a credit account for the merchant had been opened for me, with a spending limit of £150 and an APR of you-don’t-want-to-know; I could, however, bypass the credit account by clicking on a particular button and paying by debit card. This I did.

Does anybody else see what’s wrong with this picture? We’ve had, over the past couple of years, an endless stream of news stories about, basically, individuals/corporations/governments who have got themselves into severe financial difficulties by using too much credit, and now here’s this company effectively telling me that the only means of purchasing their goods is to open a credit account – a process which, moreover, required me to give them precisely no information about my finances, just my date of birth, address and postcode. That’s irresponsible batshit insane. I assume they checked my name, date of birth and postcode against a credit register; I didn’t agree to that, I didn’t need that to be done, and I’d never in a million years have undertaken any kind of credit agreement at the kind of APR these people offer (a whopping 39.9%).

Fast forward a few days, and the parcel arrived. Given that it was only supposed to contain three shirts, it was surprisingly large. I found out why when I opened it. Six shirts, four denim, two corduroy, three charged to my debit card and three charged to this unwanted credit account. Cynics among you may not be astonished to learn that this delightful organisation’s customer service line is an 0871 number (= 10p/minute, not covered by any kind of inclusive billing plan). The call took 35 minutes, 20 of which were spent on hold listening to the kind of muzak that makes Frank Wildhorn sound like Tchaikovsky, with periodic interruptions from a recorded voice that told me the company cared about my call. It took conversations with three different people to arrange a returns label to send the unwanted shirts back and get the billing straightened out so that they would be refunded against the credit account. I sent them back, I heard nothing more, I forgot about it.

Fast forward another couple of weeks, to yesterday, and a bill plops into the mat for this credit account, for three of these shirts. I go online, log into this credit account that I’d never asked to open… and see that, yes, they’ve received the returned shirts and refunded them to my debit card. The result – another lengthy call to the 0871 number to check that the payment had been applied correctly and get the account closed down. In the end, my attempt to avoid spending 20 minutes in Debenhams by ordering online took far longer than I’d have spent just going into town. And, really, 39.9%? That’s not an APR, it’s a stick-up. At least I like the shirts.