Dear LPG,

I was born not long after the end of the second world war when everything was rationed when my parents went shopping, they spent a lot of time ‘making do’, but I was a young consumer of the 1970’s and when I was young free and single and ready to shop, there were shops where you could really take your time and make an informed choice.

Do you remember the days when, if you wanted to buy one of those new-fangled electrical gadgets that we would all see advertised between our favourite television programmes, we would go to the appropriate shop where there would be one on show for you to touch, experiment and play with to your heart’s content before you decided if you wanted to actually buy it or not? I am talking about cookers, vacuum cleaners and fridges, televisions and, when they first became available for the average person, computers.

When it comes to electrical and computer goods I remember the 1990’s.   I remember being able to go into one of the many shops where you could ask an assistant about all those, now-retro but then state of the art purchases, and get informed answers, although even then you would need to be careful not to confuse salesmanship with the real facts. 

I am thinking about shops like Rumbelows, Comet, Software etc. and we really have to remember one of the more recent casualties, Maplins. Now we can take a look on YouTube and someone will have ‘unboxed’ and demonstrated the item, but it is really not the same.

I have to thank LPG because your pages inspired me, in spite of my senior years, to buy myself a fitness tracker when I read PT’s article (►►►)  and, even though my ‘3000 steps a day’ target would make the average youngster laugh, I have to admit to making a little more effort with exercise these days as a result. 

I wanted to buy one for my mum and we did the research on YouTube, but there are some things you just cannot learn that way.  You can’t learn if the display will be bright enough for your eyes to see, how easy it will be for older fingers to manipulate the touchscreen, if you will be able to understand the readout on the screen, how easy it is to charge or how comfortable you would find it, without trying it.  We went to the only electrical goods high street shop that we have left, only to find that they do sell them and they do have them all boxed up and ready to go if you want to buy one, but the only one on display was a real sized dummy model which was attached to the display counter.  When we asked a few questions the assistant had to go to the internet to answer them.  She knew no more than I had learnt from YouTube.

The truth is that all this online shopping has allowed consumers to take their eye off the ball.  The few shops that we have left on the high street leave us just about as informed as an online picture really and if you send for something the sellers are learning that, even though it is not exactly what we want, so many of us buyers will make do rather than bother to send it back and try another.

I recently read an article which pointed out that while most of us make do, younger people who shop online, particularly for clothes are doing so prepared to send a lot of their shopping back, and while I think we can overdo that too, perhaps more of us need to take a leaf or two from that book of online shopping habits.

MR, Dartford.

MR shares an article which offers the extreme opposite of the average, modern shopping attitude…

(►►►)