Retail Therapy.

The high street has been taking a bit of a beating recently thanks to the poor economic climate. Many companies have seen profits drop to an absolute low with some taking the drastic measures of closing stores and making staff redundant.

If the current economic climate were an actual climate then I would liken it to the harsh dry sandy deserts of the Sahara. Although every desert has an oasis. For example Marks & Spencer recorded a growth in sales recently, while Sports Direct have been making a profit. It appears the chavs who used to shop at Jolly Jolly Bargains (JJB) have moved retailer and are now shopping at Sports Direct!

Largely though, the desert is very very dry. Carpetright have had the rug pulled from under them with a massive 70% drop in profit and Halfords have revised their estimated profits dramatically as well. HMV is being decimated by its competitors, although they seem to be committing retail suicide by charging over double the amount you’ll find on Amazon. And even the chocolatier, Thorntons, has announced they are to close at least 120 stores across the UK. People aren’t even buying chocolate anymore! Bargain Booze will be going bust next!

All of this retailer toil has been caused by the fact that people just don’t have the disposable income to splash out anymore. People are losing their jobs, having their housing benefits and the like slashed, and struggling to put food on the table at home; British Gas aren’t helping matters either by raising their fuel costs by around 18%!

But is that really true? Are people really as strapped for cash as we think? Take last weekend for example, a fair few retailers, particularly clothing stores, decided to bring out their sales. The likes of Next, Gap, and H&M were battling with each other to get a hold of the public’s pound coins, and it appears they’ve succeeded!

I had the great pleasure of working at a clothing retailer over the weekend and all I can say is people either have too much money or they’re completely insane. Personally I think it’s a mixture of the two.

The store opened at 5am which is quite early by anyone’s standards I’d imagine, but not for some bargain hunters! At 5am the queue just to get into the store and browse was spanning over 100m and those at the very front told us they’d been there since 2.30am! These people are insane! Police apparently even came over to them to enquire what they were up to… I bet they had a right laugh.

Once the doors do open it is something to behold. It’s like a great dam has been broken and all of them gush in relentlessly as if their very lives were on the line. Watching these people run around the store like crazed animals is something that must be seen to be believed. They just feast on the clothes, some of them don’t even look at what they’re grabbing, not the style nor the size, they just grab it before anyone else does and run off to find more.

Of course there are always those moments where you find two women clutching onto opposite arms of a small child’s knitted top, these moments are my favourite moments because it turns my hellish day into an Olympic event. Two women fighting over a garment is like a tug of war, neither of them are willing to back down so they just pull at the garment for dear life until finally one of their grips falters and one is left victorious! Honestly they should get this stuff in the Olympics, jazz it up, I’d even referee if they wanted me to.

As you may have guessed the predominant gender at these events is female, you’ll even find they outnumber their male counterparts in the menswear section. The men who are present are of course the poor unfortunate husband or boyfriend who’s been dragged along to this ‘event of the year’ at 5am in the morning when they’d rather be in bed watching Saturday morning tele.

These men are brilliant, they are essentially used by their wives and girlfriends to either hold things or my personal favourite, stand in the queue for them. It’s an ingenious ploy done by these masterminding women; they’re obviously pros at this, they know what they’re doing. They run in the store and search out clothes while the man goes and stands in the queue to the till empty handed. He effectively acts as a fast-track for the woman upon when she wants to queue up, now she no longer needs to start from the back as her poor husband is stood in line already! Well it works for him too I suppose, gets him home quicker!

I also love it when women run back and forth to their queue-jumper dumping piles upon piles of clothing onto him. One man I saw had so many clothes in his arms he was struggling to get his chin over the top of the pile!

And may God help them if they wander off. From time to time you see this schoolboy error by men. They’ll be stood in a queue but then something will catch their eye from a distance. Maybe a colourful tie or an old tatty striped jumper, whatever it is they cannot resist its lure, and so they wander off, away from the queue to examine their find more closely.

Of course this is at its most entertaining when their wife returns to the queue and he isn’t there. Her face turns from one of stressful exhaustion to one of pure anger and hatred. Honestly these women are one step away from divorce papers at this point. They stand at the queue darting their necks back and forth looking for the culprit, and when they spot him it’s all over. They shout over to him in a tone that says “you are a dead man.” The husband turns around with a look of horror on his face, he knows he’s made a fundamental error. Never disobey orders on sale day. The colourful tie just isn’t worth the hassle.

This can go two ways for the man, he can either admit his wrong doing and get back in line, or he can stand up for himself like an idiot. “I just saw a nice colourful tie love” he’ll say. Male shoppers of the world I give you this one piece of advice: don’t argue with your spouse on sale day, you won’t win. I have not once seen a man win at this argument, not once! Like a savage raccoon the wife will lay into him with verbal blow after blow. If I had a pound for every time I‘ve heard a woman say to a man on sale day: “I ask you to do one thing!” I would have at least twenty quid right now…

Sale day is not the most fun you’ll ever have in your working life to be honest. Sure it has its moments but largely it’s a complete pain. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m in Britain but the customers here are generally quite rude and inconsiderate. Obviously the stock does deplete heavily from the off, and by midday most of it is gone, so imagine how annoying it is to have people complain at you at 3pm about the lack of sale stock. Sorry guys but where were you earlier!?

More annoying consumer habits occur when bringing stock out onto the floor by hand. Once you emerge into the customer arena everyone flocks to you and starts browsing your arms while you attempt to put stock on rails. “Can I just have a look at this?” “Can I take these off you?” some don’t even say anything they just snatch the stuff from you!

And if you finish the day without a bad back then you’ve done well. I’ve found that if people change their minds about the clothes they’ve picked up they simply drop them on the floor. I saw a woman browsing her husband in the queue who was picking clothes out and simply discarding them on the floor if they displeased her. You end up spending most of your day picking clothes up off the floor!

The whole day is just madness with people barging into each other, complaining, pushing and shouting at their children who are still in their pyjamas, the poor little tykes. The amount these people buy is staggering. I’ve seen up to a grand go through a till in one transaction and I’m sure that’s not the record. Where is this money coming from? Are people maxing out the credit card, or do they have more spending money than is being reported? Not everyone’s won the Euromillions!

I’m sure on the Saturday these stores made large amounts of cash, but to be honest, a lot of it comes back on Sunday. I think people run about buying as much as they can carry, then they get home and lay it all out, pick out what they want (or what will fit them) and then return everything else to the store. This must be a bit of a problem for the companies as the buzz around first day of sale will be worn off by the time some people return their unwanted items.

Also a problem is the knowledge that most the people who are buying excessive amounts are probably going to take those items either to their market stalls or to the boot of their cars on a Sunday morning to make money. I’m not really sure that’s very fair on the retailers, but then again their mark-up on their products is pretty big anyway.

Sales are a big occasion for bargain hunters and stores alike. They provide a boost to the store’s turnover and also give people the opportunity to get clothes on the so called ‘cheap’. I suppose with clothes at least there are bargains to be had, it’s not like sofa companies who offer sale items that have only been available at ‘full price’ in a dark corner of the showroom for the mandatory 28 days.

People always say that they enjoy the sales, but you could’ve fooled me. Most of the time everyone there looks stressed out, miserable, tired and cranky; as if this is a chore rather than the enjoyable day out that’s portrayed. Maybe they’re enjoying being this stressed out, maybe the husbands enjoy being shouted at and the kids like being dragged out of bed before their bedtime story concludes.

All I know is that if I wasn’t working, I’d be sleeping! There isn't a tie colourful enough to entice me out of bed at five in the morning!