The Right to Buy

On shopping addictions and boycotts

I cave, finally, after a day spent in a windowless meeting room workshopping AI’s potential uses within the trade union movement. Abandoning my superstition after admitting to colleagues that I’d been avoiding the forecast ahead of the wedding I was set to attend that weekend, I check the weather: a wet Saturday for both guests and those marching in central London – as it would turn out, our paths would cross mid-afternoon around Vauxhall Bridge and the rain would only start as the party ended. I also check the tracking link to a bag I’ve bought (suede, square, orange, Arket) off a third-party retailer. They said it would take 4-7 business days and I ordered it last week. I seem to be in luck: the bag should be getting to my office the tomorrow afternoon, just in time for my outfit and my friend’s big day.

This is supposed to be a no-spend 2024. In a way, it still is: my rule, similar to 2022 is that, bar socks and underwear, I am not to buy any brand-new clothes. It’s been a couple of years since listening to Lauren Bravo’s book How to Break Up with Fast Fashion but it’s lingered with me and is a good book if you want an encouraging, relatively soft kick up the arse about your fashion consumption.

Accessories and shoes have sat outwith the ban both years. The first new thing I bought in 2023 was the viral Uniqlo shoulder bag in Berlin; on our final night of the mini-break, my friend and I were two of at least four people in the rather small natural wine and small plates place who were wearing one just that evening. Uniqlos, the physical shops, are actually a bit disgusting in the immediate aftermath of a temporary repudiation of fast fashion; walking into one of the Berlin branches, identical to the various central London branches I work near, the abundance of items didn’t feel like choice, but rather a future noxious bonfire in the making. The horror subsided quickly, though: over the course of last year, I replenished my heat-tech collections (t-shirts, socks, leggings) and the revulsion at the sheer volume of that many garments in that many colourways across so many stores, worldwide at almost ‘incidental spend’ price points waned. It resurfaced, though, recently, when my Berlin trip friend messaged saying she was eyeing up the new crochet version of the deceptively spacious, albeit nauseatingly ubiquitous, shoulder bag.

Hmm…Crochet cannot be done by machines, I replied. Not to say other things aren’t made by people working with machines too, but it’s not like sewing, so I doubt the price will reflect the hours it will have taken someone to make one.

Instagram pushed me the bag too: they’re selling it for £19.99. I’m not a textiles expert, but I highly doubt that each one takes less than an hour to make, even if you were a very practised in crochet. Because how much are these workers getting paid such that laborious handmade items are able to make something that will be costed to cover marketing, overheads and a decent profit margin for Uniqlo’s bosses, such that each one is less than twenty quid?

I am a sufferer of the ‘women be shopping’ disease. Or, to be less glib about it, I do think my deep enjoyment of paying for things (clothes, a bit, but mainly food these days), amounts to something like a barely managed addiction. The dreariness of bringing my lunch into work every day is less about the time spent cooking, although in my new, more cramped and less ventilated kitchen, making meals is more faff. Rather, it’s the prospect of depriving myself of a little contactless tap: oh, just a wee coffee or a cookie or a bun or salad box or a something to remind myself of my activity, but also, pathetically, of my ‘freedom’. I feel like an American being told to reduce their car journeys in a not-so-walkable city when I’m faced with the prospect of a sincere no-spend day, let alone more than one day next to each other. It’s worse than that, actually: when I drafted this piece in my notebook back in March, I jotted down that my thighs were starting to tingle and ‘there’s the beginning of a constriction in my stomach.’ “They can’t make me!” I feel like shouting. “I couldn’t possibly do it!” I am scared to try. But I was similar scared of my Dry July last year and I managed it. I am scared to try to change my behaviour, in case it reveals that my relationship to dopamine, and an increased predilection towards addiction due to family history, means I can’t give certain things up.

The right to buy is an absurd concept. Maybe it’s the Naomi Klein audiobook I’ve been listening to for three months coming out here, but really, it’s the right to be sold to and to be marketed at, which in a post-Thatcher world, is basically to assert one’s existence. The car is a symbol of freedom, because you are both behind the steering wheel, so literally (seemingly) in control of one’s destiny, but it also indicates sufficient purchasing power to get you where you need to go.

I got into buying little coffees from Pret when I had a 4 day a week, £100 a day job as an arts administrator in Shoreditch many years ago. One week of work would pay for my rent back up in Glasgow; two weeks and I had covered the bills and at least a couple of Railcard-ed returns along the west coast mainline to make it worthwhile. Suddenly, I wasn’t absolutely grottily broke any more. It was summer and my life didn’t have to revolve around the vegetable of the week at the Maryhill Road Lidl. But I’m not a financial underdog anymore; I have put an offer on a flat partially due to an inherited deposit and, were it not for my pension contributions, I think the promotion I’ve just secured at work would put me into the next tax bracket. I could blame my spending on being perennially single – and not in a cute, girl about town way, but a dour, negative space way that doesn’t make for particularly exciting or empowering narratives for other women around my age – but my life isn’t empty. Not at all! I am alive and I have choices.

I was thinking a lot about the ‘rightness’ of buying both when confronted by that crochet Uniqlo bag, but also before then. Ever since last autumn, when calls for the boycott, divestment and sanctions of some Israeli goods and cultural exports grew louder. The fact is that, despite it being obvious to me that the Israeli administration and military is conducting a slew of crimes against humanity in full sight of the international community and not enough is being done, I do understand why people, myself included in the past, have been hesitant to commit to BDS in this instance. To boycott Israeli products necessarily means boycotting Jewish-run businesses, and fundamentally there are more troubling implications of that than suffocating Afrikaner wealth and respectability during the height of South African apartheid. It is still worth doing, though. Any sincere argument for it that will convince those unsure must account for this; I point to Naomi Klein’s article in the Guardian from earlier this year for some good pointers on ways to approach the urgency of a boycott. Often the best articulators of a cause are not its early adopters.

I write this on the evening of Eurovision, which many of my friends usually do watch and far fewer seem (seem…) to be concerning themselves with this year after Palestinians called for a boycott of the soft power, high pop event. I fear that the Thatcherite principle of the right to buy, plus the mangling of id-pol and influencer culture into making more of us think of enterprises as people, rather than corporate interests (I will never get over the way the unlawful killing of a black man resulted in well-meaning content creators putting highlights on their Instagram accounts in 2020 of black-owned businesses to support) means that we are losing recipes when it comes to refusing our custom.

Nestle is once again distributing milk products in the Global South in ways that are detrimental to the health of those in those communities: this time, instead of pushing powdered formula to women without reliable access to clean water, they are now selling added-sugar products in certain markets while not in ones like the UK and Europe. Last time, there was a widescale, public and commercially damaging boycott of Nestle’s productions. What will happen now? I am unconvinced there will be much.

The fact is that a lot of organising requires campaign discipline – being told that your individual needs and wants do not and cannot matter in the face of a cause bigger than ourselves. While a lot of people are sincerely worried about BDS being used as a cloak for antisemitism, I’ve also seen people basically say that it will be tricky to adhere to. Well…yes. It will be. I bloody love a McDonald’s breakfast, for instance. So it will be hard – until such time as it becomes unwise financially for companies that rely on our participation to keep afloat keep on supporting practices we vehemently disagree with. I am not perfect when it comes to my convictions, as evidenced by the fact I am waiting on a brand new La Veste school shirt to arrive at my office next week, because the secondhand options cost about the same and I wanted something lasting to celebrate getting the new job. But it’s harder to duck out of them if we all bang on about our commitments to each other, and admit that there is scope for individual opt-outs as a means to achieve progress, even if it can initially feel rather useless.