Shopping should involve exquisite displays and smells. NOT a white van on a garage forecourt

THERE was a threepronged morning ritual to my summer job in the local department store when I was a teenager. First of all I had to polish the glass display cabinets so that the exquisite leather gloves and other accessories could be shown off to best effect. Then came the folding of the reams of tissue paper – cutting the huge sheets in two, then again, and then folding them into a neat pile, all ready for whatever beautiful item required tissue wrapping once the shoppers descended.

Finally, there was the job I really hated. Out came piles of empty cardboard boxes from the day before, shallow boxes that had held maybe six or eight packets of women’s tights before they were unpacked and put on display.

My task was to break the corners on all the boxes, fold them flat, one on top of the other, tie them up, and then remove them to the bin area outside the back of the shop.

Spoiled

Glamorous, it wasn’t. But the shop itself and the top-quality merchandise that it stocked certainly was. And my menial morning tasks were all part and parcel of an ethos that dictated that quality and good service were paramount in this establishment.

This was Dixons of Coleraine in the 1970s. (It’s still there today, and just in case you are wondering, no, it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Dixons of electrical retail fame.)

It was the swankiest shop in the town and the one where beautiful clothes, lovely household linens, delicate lingerie and gorgeous leathers were the order of the day. It was a shop where the customer was always the priority, where it was never any trouble to the staff to go the extra mile for them. It was a place where customer satisfaction was guaranteed, where people came to shop from as far away as Derry, and even from Belfast, 50 miles distant.

Dixons was shopping at its best and it was also where my own father ran the gentlemen’s outfitting department with the utmost care and attention. The same customers came to him for decades in the knowledge that he knew their needs precisely and would do his very best for them. He built up relationships with many of his customers and, later, with their children. He could tell a man’s inside leg measurement from across a football pitch, a hat size from sitting a number of rows behind someone at the cinema.

‘A 38 short,’ he’d say, or ‘a 40 long’, when I’d point at some random man in the street and test my father’s skills at dressing him in the correct sized jacket.

Ironically, however, although I was steeped in the business at home and despite my own ‘start’ in retail, I’m not what you would call a shopper. But when I do shop – like at Christmas – I realise that my early exposure to proper retailing has spoiled me forever.

For when I shop I like to do precisely that – go to a shop, wander around, ask for assistance and have my purchases specially wrapped if possible. What I like, in other words, is the experience of shopping. Not just choosing an item and parting with my debit card details.

Online shopping is now huge, of course. It’s so easy, everyone says. You just make your purchase, cough up your money and you’re done and dusted. A few days later your parcel arrives and you have avoided all those car-parking queues, all that trying-on clothes in cramped fitting rooms, all that battling your way to the tills. All of which is true, up to a point.

But there is no pleasure in that kind of shopping. I’ve done it. Books from Amazon aside, I have also gone the general online route from time to time.

A couple of years ago, coming up to Christmas, I had no option when an ankle operation and follow-up crutches confined me to home in December.

I was sucked in at first, seduced by the ease and the speed of it. And by the ring on the doorbell a few days later.

Frustrated

And then just a couple of weeks ago I gave it another go. I bought three items online from different retailers.

When the first one arrived I wasn’t at home. When the second one arrived the following day I was in the car en route to the depot to pick up the first one.

‘I can’t hang around here, love,’ said the helpful delivery guy on the end of my mobile. ‘But I’m only ten minutes away,’ I protested.

No way, he said. He’d be back the next day. But I wouldn’t be there the next day, I told him. For I too had one of those things, just like him – a job. Okay, he conceded, he’d meet me at an appointed place in 20 minutes. We synchronised our watches.

Half an hour later, and up against the clock for work, I had the first delivery in my boot and the second had been handed over to me in a garage forecourt, in a take-it-or-leave-it manner, out of the window of a van and with the engine still running. I felt like I’d stumbled into Love/Hate.

I arrived into work shortly afterwards, flustered and frustrated with my earlymorning to-ings and fro-ings.

And then my phone rang. Delivery number three. ‘I’m standing outside your gaff,’ said this customer-friendly operative. ‘Can you let me in?’ ‘No,’ says I. ‘I can’t. I’m in work.’ ‘Well, give me the code and I’ll leave it in the hallway of the apartment block,’ says he.

‘I can’t give you the code,’ says I. ‘It’s a security code. And anyway, you can’t just leave a parcel sitting where anyone can walk off with it.’

‘Okay, have it your own way,’ says customer-service operative of the year, ‘but I won’t be back your way until next week.’

Superior

A row ensued. Finally, I persuaded him to drop it to a friend’s house. But not that day, of course. No way. You’d want to see the amount of ‘shagging deliveries’ he had to get through. It was delivered five days later.

So, it’s no contest, I’m afraid. It’s back to the shops for me. Not that I ever really left them.

For ‘going shopping’ as opposed to just ‘shopping’ is by far the superior experience. And it’s a way to make memories too.

It’s the shops – and the assistants – that put themselves out for you that you always remember. Like the woman in Clerys, 17 or 18 years ago, who, when my husband was a bit unsure about a coat he was choosing for me, asked him if she was similar to my size and build. She wasn’t, as it happened. But he pointed to one of her colleagues and over she came. On went the coat and she did a few twirls up and down the floor for him. When I opened the parcel on Christmas Day, the coat fitted to perfection. I wear it still.

Another year, when money was tight, we hit on a plan. We would spend no more than €100 in total on each other. But that amount of money had to purchase five gifts, each one representative of each of the five senses.

What fun that was. Not a particularly easy shopping experience, but certainly a real one and undoubtedly a memorable one.

And actually, a very appropriate one, in the light of this shopping debate. Because, when you shop online, the last thing involved are the senses.

For when did you ever feel the quality of a velvet scarf on your laptop? Or smell Jo Malone’s most recent floral scent? Or the pages of an ancient, yellow-paged book?

And you certainly won’t see the real perspective of a piece of art online, not in a way that you can appreciate the proper detail of the piece.

And without the senses, what do we have? If we can’t touch, taste, smell, see and hear, then that’s a shopping experience that is no experience at all.

I learned that many years ago. For even the smell of the polish and the feel of the soft tissue paper from my early-morning retail endeavours still remain with me.

And that’s shopping as it should be.