Shopping

The algorithm got me in the end. It began with recipe content, and once I was hooked on food influencer videos, I began to be pummelled with adverts for attractive pots and pans, then clothes, and from there an ever-widening vista of objets and objects by turns pretty or useful and occasionally both. The result, apart from frittering away a certain amount of money on non-essential cardigans and kitchen gadgets, has been the development of a ruthless taste and approach to e-commerce. I want to have, and want to give, nice things, and increasingly I know where to get them. I am also hopelessly disorganised, a snob and far from awash in cash. If you’re anything like me and have yet to get your gifts sorted out, read on.

‘Do you have any more shoes? I need as many as you can find for my daughters.’ I had just made my first sale on the second-hand marketplace Vinted and, already, here was a message from a new customer wanting more. Delighted, I scrambled around and managed to locate more than a dozen pairs of no-longer-wanted, muddy old shoes. ‘Don’t worry about cleaning them,’ came the reply from ‘Mariella’ when I told her the good news. ‘They’re just for the garden.’ Slightly odd, I thought, but my customer seemed harmless enough: a part-time cleaner with young children who, she told me rather quaintly, was married to a cobbler.  It was only when I had to ship the huge black bin liner of shoes that I realised I had been duped.

Once upon a time, post was delivered by a postman or postwoman. Over the past two centuries, this quaint initiative augmented a sense of community and invested early mornings with at least fleeting human contact. These days, decades after the slow demise of letter writing, a postman is now a rather recherché figure and, thanks to Royal Mail price hikes, a symbol of luxury, despite the downgrading of his once resplendent red and blue woollen frockcoat for a synthetic combo including all-weather shorts.

Even if you couldn’t care a fig for sustainability, it’s hard not to be impressed with the Nostradamus-esque foresight of the milk float. In an era when Old King Coal ruled the roost and recycling meant pedalling backwards on your Raleigh Grifter, the pre-dawn hour across the UK was the stage for a phalanx of electric vehicles trundling along our streets and lanes delivering our order of gold or silver top in reusable, pint-sized bottles. The decline of the milkman in percentage figures would cause palpitations to the most hardened of economic wonks. In the 1970s, 94 per cent of Britons had their milk delivered to their doorstep via an electric float – while in 2016 just 3 per cent of milk was delivered by milkmen, according to Defra. What happened?

Ordering things online can be a lottery. You can’t touch, smell or taste the product you’re buying, so it’s hard to know whether you’ll actually want it when it arrives. But we keep clicking anyway because it’s more convenient than trudging to the shops and things are often cheaper. For me, another reason to order online is the dash of childlike joy it brings to my to life when I click ‘buy’ and instantly set up a future treat. In fact, it’s even better than childhood because now I can have a parcel to open any day I want, not just on birthdays and Christmas. But most of all, I shop online because I love tracking my parcel. Anytime I like, I can check in and see where my purchase is in the delivery process.

It was when I saw an entire crate of orange juice exit my local supermarket that I knew something had died. The Artful Dodger school of shoplifting has officially been boarded up, its artisan poachers and pilferers as redundant to the modern world of thieving as swag bags, eye masks and soft sole shoes.  There’s no longer any attempt at discretion or skill when it comes to shoplifting in my nearest Co-op in south London. The thieves don’t enter in trench coats and furtively peruse the aisles. They stroll in, take as much as they can carry and walk out again, knowing that the worst punishment they face is being given some scatological invective from the five-foot-nothing woman of venerable age who is usually locked inside her till cubicle.

They were a stalwart of Britain’s towns and cities from the 1970s until their disappearance in 2007 – and now Virgin is set to bring its Megastores back to the high street. According to the Times, the Virgin Group has in mind at least one central London site as a possible location for a new Megastore. Its chief executive, Josh Bayliss, said he wants to return the ‘human connection’ to the Virgin brand. Quite right. We should applaud this news, not just on nostalgic grounds – but for financial, aesthetic and communitarian ones too. Like so many once-familiar high street names, Virgin Megastores may have succumbed to supermarket competition and the online shopping revolution, but that revolution has not only impoverished our towns, it has impoverished us as human beings.

There are only so many times I can watch Lord Sugar swivelling in his chair and reusing put-downs from three seasons ago before enough’s enough, so I’ve dropped in and out of the latest series of The Apprentice. But one contestant that has caught my eye is Victoria Goulbourne, the flight attendant turned online sweet shop owner (note: not sweat shop, despite what one unfortunate online review might say) from Merseyside. And while I pass no judgment on her business acumen, it did get me thinking: what a miserable thing an online sweet shop must be. Victoria’s company markets itself as the ‘UK’s most Instagrammable pick ’n’ mix'. Quite apart from why sweets that belong in your gob needs to be camera-friendly, it was the selection that left me wondering.

I recently had a call with my accountant, a miniskirt-wearing, swashbuckling bon vivant and wine connoisseur. To soothe myself before we rang off – tax is always depressing – I brought up Waitrose, saying by way of apology for my erratic finances that most of my money went in the supermarket, a large branch of which is between my nearest Tube station and my flat. She hemmed knowingly down the phone. We both agreed it was a good use of funds. Life’s short – or might be. If one can, surely one ought to eat what one wants? And if that means a pair of smoked salmon, pea and lovage terrines or five types of mackerel pate on a Monday, or a medley of pre-chopped mango and strawberry with own-brand coconut and lime ice cream, then so be it.

The email landed in my inbox one afternoon, as I frantically sandwiched work in between feeding the dog and doing the school run, its subject saying: ‘A quick reminder for you, Antonia Hoyle.’ Oh God, what now? Had I forgotten to pay a bill? Missed a deadline? It was worse. I hadn’t left a review for a company I’d purchased skincare supplements from – and six days after their initial request, they sounded disappointed, adding reproachfully: ‘We would like to remind you that writing a review of your experience will help us improve our customer satisfaction.

Christmas shopping has its challenges at the best of times. Oxford Street crowds and high street tat; Black Friday generating more excitement than a White Christmas. And this year will, for many, be more challenging than ever. Who needs the Grinch when the cost-of-living monster threatens to steal Christmas? When looking to keep down the cost of presents, gravitating towards well-known British heritage brands might seem counterintuitive. The ‘big box’ instinct sometimes kicks in: the bigger the package the more expensive it’ll look under the tree, we reason. And many of us are guilty of buying presents that are more gimmicky and flashy than genuinely likely to get good use.