Shopping for (Racist) Dummies by Smack
I’m an adult human and one of the things I have mastered since becoming one is the ability to do things for myself. Nothing huge, such as build my own house or have a balanced diet, but things like wash myself, dress myself and buy things I want and need. Sometimes I can even combine those things and buy things to dress myself. I know, pretty impressive. It’s great because it means that I’m independent and don’t piss people off by asking them to shop for me like a useless arsewipe.
Not everyone is as brilliant as me though and one such useless arsewipe is Liz Jones. She’s decided that some minimum-wage school kid who works in Next on a Saturday afternoon is ruining her and every other woman’s life in Britain by not taking her around high street clothes shops by the hand, dressing her and then driving her home.
Dealing with this is not in the River Island job description
There was a time when I was proud of the British High Street, considering it the best in the world. And over the past few decades, my, how we British women have supported it.
We talk about it; we read about it, endlessly, in fashion magazines; we spend our hard-earned lunch breaks and weekends trawling the shops, wrestling with overstuffed rails of clothes. We have even got into enormous credit card debt, demonstrating just how loyal we are.
Yeah, our selfless loyalty really needs to be rewarded. She’s making it sound like we’re signing up for the front line in WW1 rather than just being greedy debt-riddled narcissists who can only make our pathetic lives seem worthwhile by purchasing some overpriced jeans that we’ll stop wearing in 2 months’ time.
So Liz Jones has set off to save us all from the misery of consumer-buying, by offending, upsetting and racially abusing shop assistants whose unfortunate duty it is to deal with obnoxious, indecisive middle-class woman who are too lazy to find their own trousers.
The vast majority of young, bored, monosyllabic women who staff these stores couldn’t wait to return to having a nice chin wag with their mates.
So many times I was confronted with a young woman with no grasp of English. This isn’t a racist observation, merely that without fluent English they are not equipped to work in the service industry.
Yes, why can’t those nasty foreigners work somewhere where we don’t have to see them or speak to them? Maybe somewhere underground, or in a high-security refugee asylum?
I’m afraid I don’t care how little these people are paid. Unless they are interested, and helpful, and, like the contestants on The X Factor, prepared to put 110 per cent into a job, they will never graduate onto the next rung of the career ladder. We all have to start somewhere.
She fails to grasp the concept of working somewhere because it pays money that you need to eat and keep a roof over your head. Most people who work in a shop are not in the slightest bit interested in making a career out of putting jeans on a rack in Next. It pays the bills while you’re at Uni and you get 25% discount. Sorted.
I am tired of walking into a shop, knowing that I will have to do all the work.
Work? What, choosing an overpriced dress, trying it on, deciding whether or not it makes you look nice or shit, then walking to a counter to pay for it? Maybe having to queue for a couple of minutes? Truly this is akin to child slave labour in India.
Jones gave Next 2/10:
The staff were clearly not motivated. I stood among the non-sale items for ten minutes, and although I caught the eye of several members of people I guessed were staff (there was no uniform, so I just targeted a young woman without a handbag), they ignored me.
I literally had to shout to get some attention, even though the store, on a cold Tuesday, was not busy.
‘Can you tell me what the trousers are made of?’
‘Um, no, but the label should be inside.’
Maybe the woman without a handbag ignored her because she doesn’t work there and doesn’t want some idiot harassing her about what the sodding trousers are made of? It’s Next! They’re probably made out of polyester for fuck sake. Look at the label! As if they’re going to know what every single item of clothing is made out of in the entire shop.
Zara apparently is a haven for horrible illegal immigrants and got 3/10.
The store was light and inviting, but again I found it hard to work out who was staff. Aha! Any woman speaking Spanish on her mobile, while trying to avoid eye contact! Sorted.
I then asked to try on the shoe boots. ‘The shoe what? Wha? Wha?’”
I’m young, cool and from this country and I don’t know what a shoe boot is. Does this make me a terrible person who shouldn’t be allowed to work in a shop? Probably not.
I started to think I was invisible, and resorted to yelling. Finally, one young woman came over to me.
‘Do you have this sweater in raspberry?’ Incomprehension was etched on her lovely face.
‘Erm, if it eez not on the shop floor, then we don’t ’ave it.’ Arrrggggh!
I didn’t realise she was shopping in an episode of ‘Allo ‘Allo. Her critique of Zara is dripping with the air of a condescending patronising xenophobe who feels justified in demeaning what I can only assume to be a Spanish woman, because she’s “sweet” and “lovely”. She’s probably got a PHD in Quantum Physics from Cambridge and just didn’t want to deal with the annoying journalist looking for stupid shoes.
She’s getting even more cunty as she terrorises M & S but awards them 9/10:
At last, my invisibility cloak is wearing off. Sales assistants can actually see me, although it did take me standing, with armfuls of clothes, in Per Una for seven minutes before someone came over.
She smiled. This is rare. I smiled back. Even rarer.
I dropped the bundle at her feet. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, picking it up. ‘Can I carry this for you?’
‘No, I can’t be bothered,’ I told her.
To be honest, if someone did that to me while I was working in a shop, I would gladly punch them in the face and not even regret having to eat dust for the next month because I’ve been fired and can’t pay the rent.
I then said I was having problems with a bra.
‘It has gone all fuzzy, and the wire has come out of one cup.’
‘Can I look?’
‘I’m wearing it.’
‘Oh-kay, well let’s go to lingerie, and I’m sure we can get you a new one.’
I felt a bit like a special needs person, but, really, they couldn’t have been more helpful.
Ah yes, “special needs”. The politically correct term for those mentally handicapped folks. Definitely not offensive, disgusting or downright abusive to every human in the world, especially when used in the context of a shop assistant taking your spoilt, brattish behaviour in good stride and bending over backwards to help you out, the very rarity of which the article is bemoaning. Maybe don’t act like a fucking idiot by complaining about your disgusting bra if you want to be treated like everyone else?
Topshop got 5/10 because the girl was “American”, didn’t know what the elusive shoe boot was and didn’t help her with the buckles on the boots she was trying on. So she doesn’t want to be treated like a “special needs” person but she wants to be treated like a child who can’t put their shoes on? Face-fucking-palm.
Finally, H & M gets 7/10, concluding a pointless pathetic article.
Again, the staff were in leggings, which is just not good enough. I thought back to the press launch of Lanvin for H&M, to the flutes of champagne, and the goodie bag, and the canapés, and realised quite how detached editors and stylists are from the coal face of shopping.
It really is remarkable how far removed a high street store selling cheaply-made average clothes is from a press launch! H &M clearly has a high number of staff and a high staff turnover and cannot afford to dress them all in clothes straight off the catwalk. High street shoppers want to see sales staff looking accessible by wearing clothes they too can buy and look good in. Sales staff also have to run around after whinging shoppers, put clothes on the racks and do lots of other mundane duties, for which you need to be wearing comfortable clothes to perform. Also, who gives a shit?
She found me a nice white shirt with a hint of stretch, but failed when it came to the suit, showing me cotton, which looked cheap. I think she knew most of the merchandise was sub-standard, but she really did try her best.
What happens if I buy the trousers and they are too long?
‘Well, you will have to take them to a tailor.’
‘You won’t take them up?’
‘God, no.
The bottom line is, high street shops cater for people who want clothes off the rack as they come. You pay low prices for minimal service and substandard workmanship and material. If you want a sycophantic personal shopper who will walk you around the shop, tell you what you should buy, help you try it on whilst looking beautiful and immaculate and showering you with compliments, then pay for that service in an expensive exclusive store that provides it. Don’t bother some kid in H&M because the £30 suit you want to buy looks a bit shit. That’s just you, love.
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© 2012
This Liz Jones article reads like someone writing a parody of a Liz Jones artilce. Exactly what the fuck is she going on about?
How is this women still writing articles? Was she not fired after her terrible Jo Yeates piece?
Is this woman so far up her own arse that she can’t see how much of a fucking idiot she sounds?
Dear Liz Jones,
If you can spare just a moment out of your busy schedule of traumatising people who don’t deserve it and then writing it up to produce some sort of necrotic tripe that must only make sense in a bizarre parallel universe, I invite you to visit the neuroscience institute at which I work, where some of the people who work in clothes shops on weekends spend 50 hours per week trying to cure brain disorders and earn a PhD in neuroscience.
Please prepare yourself, though, as some of them (a lot of them, actually) may be speaking Spanish (or Cantonese, or Vietnamese, or German, or pretty much anything other than English) on their mobiles and I’m not sure we have any smelling salts with which to revive you. I will be happy to roll you into the fMRI scanner, however, to see if we can detect even the smallest amount of brain activity in your head above the level of the brainstem.
Also, perhaps you would have had more success with the shoe boots if you had used the fashionista term for them, “shooties”. I think a lot of people would certainly like to take you out for “shooties” of a different sort if they could.
Sincerely,
Someone who despairs for humanity upon reading one of your articles.
What a despicable piece of fucking shit Liz Jones is.