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Of course, we were not without a great deal of assistance in developing our new-found love affair with acquisition. In the 1960s, the humble trading stamp burst onto the scene in the form of Green Shield stamps. These were offered free of charge by retailers to add value to their market offering and to encourage loyalty from their client base. It was a great way for retailers to differentiate themselves. and suddenly individuals felt that they had increased importance to the retailer and that they were themselves people of means whose business was being actively courted. The craze for collecting these stamps and claiming free gifts from a catalogue of items spread like wildfire, as our avarice and lust for various items grew and the pound in our pockets took on a higher value (though only in our heads, as one needed hundreds of completed books of stamps to be able to exchange them for something quite small but nonetheless free).
For big items of expenditure we rapidly became familiar with the idea of hire purchase, but for smaller everyday acquisitions we had to look no further than the USA, where the credit card hadbeen created during the 1930s and had become well established by the 1950s. Because the UK bought movies and television programmes from the US, it was plain for all to see that everyone in the USA lived like kings, with luxurious houses, huge cars and every labour-saving device known to man.
It wasn’t long before everyone in the UK wanted the same things, and with the advent of independent commercial television in 1955 we soon became used to seeing regular advertisements for things we didn’t know we wanted. There were fourteen regional franchises distributing ITV from Penzance to Penicuik, and our conversion to an acquisitive society happened almost overnight. By the end of the 1960s, we had the desire to acquire things long before we could afford to buy them, encouragement from advertisers and retailers that it was normal to feel this way, and the wherewithal thanks to hire purchase, overdrafts and credit cards to do so.
As savings declined and spending increased, people found it easier and easier to justify their spending both to themselves and to others, and in this process an essential part of consumer behaviour was born. The concept, to quote a hair products advertisement, ‘because you’re worth it’ is a fundamental part of the consumer process. No one can successfully spend money on themselves if they believe that they are unworthy recipients of the goods or services purchased. Instead, we seek solace and satisfaction from the act of purchasing, which acts rather like an artificial endorphin: just as our massive national consumption of chocolate revolves around the notion of self-reward, so the act of buying something, if all the component parts come together into a successful experience, is both satisfying and rewarding. The phrase ‘retail therapy’ reflects this concept admirably.
It is easy to adopt a stereotypical approach to this; all Scots are reputed to be mean, all women want to do is to buy shoes etc but deep down, we all know that that isn’t true. Every single one of us is, to a greater or lesser extent, an avid consumer even though we may not know it. Some of us are innately spontaneous and buy things without any period of contemplation, others research the whole concept to death and, in a time of economic difficulty, it is no surprise that the rise of comparison websites has been astronomical. Now, even those who like to research the minute details are interested in the consumer reviews of purchasers who did so before them. Ten years ago, few of us would have been interested in what someone we’d never met thought or wrote but now, most of us read the consumer reviews as a sort of filter to check on the product claims and to prepare ourselves for purchase. In a measure of self protection, we even have formed a virtual community of other consumers. With the advent of social media, that virtual community can topple governments – literally.
It is clear that the principal influences on the development of this process of self-reward have been many and complex but the end result has been an explosion in consumerism and the creation of an altogether self-orientated approach to wanting things on our own terms. We should remember, however, that this description fits each one of us too and, even though we may choose to compartmentalise the idea of consumerism as an interesting social construct, it has a massive, daily effect on our own lives, those of our friends and families and the difference between success and failure in our businesses.
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