A mind boggling, bonkers piece of recent research proposes that ‘Brits’ were happier in the 1880’s. How does it know? Well because they read loads of books, no,not the happy fun loving Brits of the 1880’s, but the researchers . And not really them but computers,or rather we must assume that as the claim was made that the research was conducted by going through 8 million books and 65 million articles, from that period analysing the words used that may construe a state of ‘happiness’ (14,000 to be precise). I know computers are super fast and they can work how many calories martians need to survive, without knowing what they look like. But I am not convinced they can interpet that amount of data without quantifying the quality and origins of the written pieces.

You have to question the methodology.  Infant mortality was around 15%, extreme poverty was still pretty rife, women did not have the vote, yes from the 1880’s improvements were starting to filter through to everyday life but it was hardly a bunch of roses for the average family. Whilst literacy was around the 70% mark,its hard to imagine the Smith family sitting down on a Sunday afternoon (oh yes no telly then, don’t you know …no not even X Box’s) pouring over a pile of books or the Sunday papers.

More to the point who funds this type of research and why ? More recently I read some research coming out of the Economic Research Unit (Unit not the famous Group as in ERG. I believe that Economic and Research has little to do with the ERG), where one of the economists suggested that if UK retailers embraced Halloween in the same way as the US then UK Retail would be a lot more buoyant. If I remember correctly they said something like ….if more retailers stocked Halloween, novelties, cards  ( what Halloween cards? flipping ‘eck-my words), decorations and dress up stuff…. What are these people smoking when they write this stuff.

Only this week more amazing research has come out showing that an interview is decided within the first seven words the interviewee has spoken. The study was carried out with the interviewers not knowing the background or seeing the cv of the person they were interviewing . So the candidate who drops their ‘h’s ‘, talks with a west indian patois, interlaced with a heavy geordie accent,  with a  background of having spent ten years in medical research, developed a cure for brain cancer, climbed everest, given numerous presentations to the UN and has written 23 best selling novels under a pen name(so they dont recognise his name) in his spare time , has little chance of getting the job ‘cos they don’t know anything about them and can’t understand a word they are saying.

I know the media only publishes this stuff as fillers,but ultimately they get funded by someone, and someone else (plus the first someone) will make use of the results. Its a bit like the Coffee is good from you one week , bad for you another, no alcohol is better for you  then the following week and half bottle of whsky a day will stop you going bald. you pick the one that suits you best and take the consequences.

Worse still it feeds into the fake news narrative. Not that this type of research is fake news per se. But taken in isolation and out of context , it most certainly is. Why is society littered with ‘fad diets’ ? Because a bit of research has just shown that by eating the grass in the park twice a week will help you loose ten kilos, make you faster, fitter, more intelligent and more attractive to the local farmers cattle. No, of course , it hasn’t really, just trying to illustrate the idiocy of some the apparent data that the media is so keen to dispense.

So it’s nearly one hundred and forty years since we, in the U.K., were happy. Not so, says research published in The Times, only last week. Apparently, despite all the political and social discord, we are , mostly, all pretty happy now ?? See chart below if you doubt me(perish the thought now!) and this was additional research published in , no less than, the Financial Times , in May .

 

If you are face to face, and you don’t know the face that’s facing you, then fess up .

Well I didn’t know The Face, or at least I had heard of it but never read it. It was a magazine first published in 1980 but closed down in 2004. Now subject to a rebirth, I came across an article which seems rather out of character but nevertheless intriguing.

The magazine originally was known for its articles on fashion, style, arts and culture. This article perhaps covers all of the above and a bit more. So how come it has something to say about retail. Don’t really know ‘cos I don’t read or rather I don’t read it but I did read this article of which I have nicked some paragraphs as they have some relevance. Apologies for taking chunks out and just repeating them, but there’s not much point in paraphrasing if the real thing better.

To drift through the middle of Leeds is to drift through several versions of “town” all happening at once. The city centre is almost entirely atomised, separated into distinct districts, each with its own name, history and target audience.

Trinity, which opened in 2013, is the largest and most popular of these shopping precincts, and the aimlessness we call “shopping” is everywhere: parents and children abandon Jack & Jones for lunch at Giraffe; vacant sixth-formers sift through the slim pickings of another Urban Outfitters sale. These are scenes of the unremarkable; the sort that fold away entire weekends like receipt paper.

In other ways though, Trinity is a future vision of “going into town”. The centre’s smooth walkways are wrapped around an atrium, at the heart of which stands a 15-foot metallic sculpture of a packhorse, drenched in dazzling silver light. This is still “town”, but more pristine than in the past.

So far so good . Or rather, in terms of retail not so good. But is a reasonable representation of our current stock of shopping centres. ‘Architectural’ attempts of regenerating retail but not very successfully.

Five minutes’ walk away from Trinity is Leeds’ newest shopping precinct. Built in 2016, Victoria Leeds looks more like an art gallery than a mall and has machines permanently buffing the floors. While not designed by Chapman Taylor(designer of Trinity)it has similar qualities: it’s smooth, open and glassy. As well as Calvin Klein, COS and Charbonnel et Walker, it contains the largest stained glass window in the country, created by the artist Brian Clarke, and there’s a Damien Hirst angel, wings spread, cordoned off by a low-hanging rope. A cluster of passers-by take photos while two smartly-dressed security staff watch on, walkie-talkies crackling.

What’s most striking, though, is the almost total quiet and lack of crowds. In the old shopping centres this minimal footfall might have been a cause for concern – a hallmark of irreversible decline. But in the retail world of the future this doesn’t matter. Since internet shopping precipitated the “death of the high street”, shops have taken on new meanings. Rather than focusing on selling things, they’ve become tools for building brand awareness. Mary Portas, the so-called Queen of Shops, coined an unintentionally chilling name for this new model of shop: the “brand temple”. It’s a phrase that speaks to the repositioning of retail as an experience, rather than an exchange.

This is, I think, the most interesting or perhaps relevant. Shops not actually selling anything. Which is a little disingenuous, as they are there to sell, but you don’t physically take anything away . This has vague echoes of a concept I described in a post last August, concerning a development in Dubai whereby the experience, as opposed to the shopping was paramount. They are only feint echoes as the Dubai concept is a lot more ‘Dubaish’.

The last excerpt from the article tells of a more significant aspect to this type of development. There are other similar ventures that are detailed in the article which just reinforces the trend. The last paragraph of this excerpt , is the most telling if these ‘new temples’ are successful.

Whether shopping centres can be understood as public spaces is questionable. They are ultimately businesses, so to consider them as sentimentally as we do parks or plazas is perhaps naïve. But they are also significant. For better or for worse, our towns and cities are built around shops and shopping culture. If we accept a future where cheaper shopping takes place entirely in the digital sphere, and where familiar brands like M&S and Debenhams are replaced by big-brand temples, then we accept a world in which the everyday shopper is tacitly edged out of civic life.

We’ll always be drawn into town. Even if the day comes when trainers are drone-flown directly onto our feet, there will always be time to kill. There will always be a centrifugal force pulling us back to the splash of fountains, the smell of candied nuts, the cackle of doomsday preachers through amplifiers somewhere in the middle-distance. What is waiting for us – how welcome we feel – when we get there will play no small part in defining the changing surface of our lives. Call it experiential retail or enforced window-shopping; the future, it seems, may not be for everyone.

Perhaps it’s overthinking, but there are potential unseen consequences if this was to repeat itself throughout the U.K., and elsewhere. These are social consequences, that could be the result of making the retail focus of major towns that of high end brands. It has the potential to divide town centre shoppers to the ‘have’ and the ‘have nots’ . A divisive feature much like Temples and centres of faith .

Without getting into a deep theological diatribe, it has long been an accusation of most faiths within the U.K. that the pursuit of happiness is shifting from spiritual worship to that of consumerism. Whilst there maybe some truth in that, it is surely up to those religions to make their temples a more attractive proposition than those of the retailer.