Ten Worst Shop Chains by shoutingatco.ws
These visions of shopping hell are in no particular order, but represent establishments that we, wherever possible, avoid. Infuriatingly, they persist on the high street or those retail parks that you get now.
Blockbuster
Renting videos used to be the typical Saturday alternative to going out. With only a handful of terrestrial channels, no internet and a hatred for conversation, what else was there to do? You had a VCR machine willing and waiting to receive The Bodyguard any time you liked.
The problem with Blockbuster was two-fold. Firstly, in my experience, it was easier to successfully gain a green card for America than get a Blockbuster membership. Proof of address, photo ID, birth certificate, decanter of blood, hair samples, urine sample, syringe of semen – the lot. And once you finally received your Blockbuster card you raced to the shelves to get the latest release, perhaps Mrs Doubtfire or Terminator 2 (yes, I know there are several years between them)…and of course, because every other fucker had the same idea they don’t have it, so you go home with The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. Again.
Now, of course, with the brilliant invention of internet piracy, cheap DVDs and people like Lovefilm, you don’t need to set foot in Blockbuster – who have also jumped on the posting-DVDs bandwagon – and will never again be tempted to also buy a large bag of overpriced Revels to choke on while you watch Schindler’s List.
Tim Ward
Topman
Topman has been used for years by most moderate and sensible-thinking people as a fail-safe ‘dickhead indicator’, as anyone spotted wearing their putrid v-neck button T-shirts or putrid bootcut jeans can, without fail, be classed as an unimaginative dickhead with no taste or class.
It’s fucking foul. It’s Primark, but smaller, more expensive and with a slightly cooler name. The basic concept is the same; endless racks of non-descript jeans, ‘dad’ trainers, plain shirts with minor altercations such as a different coloured trim, or one extra button at the neck, or fuck knows what else.
And the staff. Oh God, the staff. It’s a row of hipster tits in ill-fitting clothing with haircuts that could pass as Tracy Emin pieces, trying to out-twat each other on subjects like NME Magazine.
‘Yeah well, I was reading the NME when I was still in the womb. I was a very music-conscious foetus’.
Owner Sir Phillip Green doesn’t pay tax either, so not only is Topman mass produced shite, it’s mass produced shite with no semblance of moral value. The real ‘capitalist clean sweep’, there. Lovely.
Nick Bryans
HMV
HMV is a warehouse of arbitrarily-priced entertainment. Piles of DVDs, CDs and video games are stacked onto the shelves, occasionally listed in alphabetical order, but usually flung randomly, where a customer has discarded them after seeing the length of the queue.
With the store music cranked all the way up to eleventy-five and the shelves pushed six inches apart, it’s more like a horrifying paranoia chamber than a happy retail establishment.
Shouting at Cows
Spar
Do you want a mini supermarket, mixed with a newsagent, crossed with an offie? You do? Great! And do you want it to be inexplicably pricey? Oh…you don’t? Probably don’t go to Spar then. Spar has 14,000 stores in 35 countries and I can only assume it is also treated as last resort outside the UK, as it is within.
The name was originally DE SPAR, an acronym of the Dutch phrase Door Eendrachtig Samenwerken Profiteren Allen Regelmatig (“through united co-operation everyone regularly profits”), which is a frankly stunning name – they should’ve kept it.
Spar seems to nicely fill the void that doesn’t exist between newsagents and supermarkets – they aren’t big enough for the weekly shop, but why queue behind the mentally unstable buying 2 litre bottles of Strongbow and those Cathedral City chutney packs when you just need a paper? Why? Because Spar is everyone’s last resort.
TW
Primark
There are few things in life as painful as a trip round Primark. Waterboarding; that’s one. Being caned; that’s another. Catching the tip of your penis in the CD case of Duran Duran’s ‘Ordinary World’ (Don’t ask. It was a crazy summer. Things were said. Stuff happened. Now I’m not allowed in the State of Vermont).
The majority of its patrons look like they’re on day release, which would probably explain the security presence resembling a particularly cautious day at Fort Knox. It was one of the major factors in breaking up with my ex. The way I see it, it’s table after table of £2 scarves that the minute we get home, she knows she’ll never wear. And yet despite this, we still return every weekend. ‘I just want to pop in Primark quickly’. Why? We learnt last weekend that it’s like a portal to hell. Why do you wish to return? Forty minutes later having spent the princely sum of £4, she leaves with two bags full of garments. Once home, the realisation sets in that actually, it’s a load of old horseshit. She puts on a brave face in an attempt to prove that I was not actually right all along, and just hope that’ll I’ll forget that she bought them in the first place, and she can bin them on the sly, so the repeat the process next weekend. But I remember. I always remember.
NB
Dixons / Currys / PC World
When talking about Dixons, it’d be easy to pick on the disinterested youths listlessly attempting to sell you a five year extended warranty. Instead, we’ll blame the company as a whole for hiring people that don’t care; for having laughable ideas about how much people should pay for wires; for positioning themselves squarely as the company that takes the piss out of people who don’t know any better.
SAC
Argos
Imagine a shop when you can’t see what you buy until it’s handed to you. It’s online shopping, but in person, with deranged staff and a secret backroom that no one ever sees.
Everyone, except this writer. While in school, I secured a lucrative job working for Argos part-time – I was handed a simply lovely purple shirt, two sizes too big, and to accompany it – a lime-green name badge. I, at times, worked behind the scenes. You know, where you never see. Well, let me tell you, the back bit of Argos, regardless of store, is fucking enormous. It’s a like the Tardis…if the Tardis was in a shopping centre…and filled exclusively with Cookworks kitchen appliances.
There only seem to be three occasions for any rational human to shop at Argos; 1) You’ve been given a gift voucher by an aunt, 2) You REALLY need a cheap, white plastic kettle, or 3) The bookies has run out of those little blue pens.
TW
Motochef
Motochefs; where you can find the food deemed ‘unsuitable’ for McDonalds burgers. That in itself is worth a visit. Knowing that they have a monopoly on the rest-stop market, Motochefs have ensured that they provide you with the lowest quality food possible in Britain to still be considered ‘street legal’.
Whether it’s a sausage roll with an 80% rusk banger, or a chicken dipper with such a high concentration of mechanically recovered chicken that it could be entered into a children’s science fair, the ‘food’ is pure filth. But what else are you going to do? Marks & Spencer has tried to add a ‘middle class’ option to the rest-stop gourmet spread, but you’re never gonna woo Eddie Stobart drivers with Mediterranean vegetable, falafel and hummus sandwiches or still lemonade, now are you?
You be better off licking their tables for nutritional value. But no doubt the pizza is at least 5% Domestos anyway, so in a sense it wouldn’t be too dissimilar.
NB
Glamour
Now, even McDonald’s has thrown a cautious arm towards the healthy-eating bandwagon. Greggs, on the other hand, struggle to evolve beyond the artery-bothering grease and pastry combo. Walk past a Greggs, and the place will always be completely empty, lacking in any sort of customer. Apart from at 12 o’clock, when every office worker within panting distance forms an orderly – but sweaty – queue, right out of the door. And then, at 1pm, just the sound of sausage rolls slowly going stale, and sales assistants announcing they’ve “run out of rolls”.
SAC
Asda
Asda – the arseslapping, Julie Walters-employing, Walmart-owned supermarket that seems to be only ever so slightly posher than Morrisons. Asda are, by and large, no better or worse than every other all-consuming supermarket overlords. But the fact they’re owned by gun-toting Walmart goes against them. As does George. Sodding George at Asda. Why? Why even try to give their clothes a ‘designer’ name like “George at Asda”… And why frigging George? Could they have picked a more boring name?
I can only assume that there is indeed a man called George, at Asda HQ in Leeds, designing entirely grey school clothes and Spiderman t-shirts. I mean, I could look it up to find that it’s named after George Davies, who founded Next, who was Asda’s chief designer…but I’m not going to.
TW
Related Posts
Recent Posts
The World at Large
Comments
Leave a Reply
© 2012
George Davis is innocent, OK?
You forgot the post office (or is that not technically a chain?)
No room for WH Smith then? Shame.
You forgot BHS too.
What about Starbucks? Trying to make tea trendy (and thus about nine times the price is should cost), but proving they are cunts in the process.
And a menu should have simply ‘tea’ and ‘coffee’ on it, with purely questions about how much milk and sugar you want in the drink. A menu with words like ‘skinny’, and ‘latte’, and even worse ‘skinny latte’ is a posh-cunty menu that should never been seen in this country. Let alone seen on every fucking street corner in the country.