AIBU to think that shopping is now a cumbersome and alienating experience?

I bloody love the self-scan things although I appreciate they aren't for everyone. Keeping track of what I'm spending as I go round and getting my offers in the app is fab.

I've got more money than I've ever had, I was looking forward to this stage of my life and buying some quality pieces - but where are they?! Even expensive stuff is rubbish and made of plastic... and I can only assume crew necks are cheaper to make than more flattering v-necks, because I can never find them either... I haven't bought anything for ages, I'm trying to look after my old stuff and stay slim enough to fit into it... (I have clothes from the eighties, the difference in quality is remarkable).

And the supermarkets have dropped the 'sell by' date on a lot of their fruit and veg 'to avoid waste' - yeah, for them! Now the stuff rots in our fridges instead of on their shelves...

I mainly use the shops to browse but wouldn't buy from the shop as then I would have to carry it home so it doesn't matter if they haven't my size as I would order it online even if they had. Shops are really just showrooms to show you examples of what you can order, there are signs saying that in them

💯

This is exactly what I do. However, I stick to Waitrose and occasionally M&S for food. I pay a bit more for a nicer shopping experience and helpful staff if I need them.

So many employers are terrible to work for and give zero shits about their staff. M&S used to be great to work for but I understand they've gone down the pan. Employers then wonder why staff are disengaged.

Where I live there just isn’t anywhere to go. M&S has zero stock in now, virtually no homeware out. We don’t have John Lewis. There’s next which I’ve always hated and places like River Island. There is a new White Stuff but it’s nowhere near as good as it used to be.
I want Debenhams and House of Frazer and a decent M&S to wander about.

The thing is the shopping places near me are rammed at times, just no one is buying anything. I think people do want to shop but there’s nothing to buy. The only place I go now is TKMaxx as at least there’s stuff to look at.

I went to one of those bargain retail parks and it was full of sports shops and suit shops, everything in FatFace was a 6 or a 24. I have money to spend but nowhere to spend it.

I ordered online from John Lewis and opted for click and collect from a Waitrose store. The delivery date was a week away, which was fine because I could combine the collection with getting something from Waitrose. Two days later, they messaged to say it was ready for collection and would be returned to the warehouse within a few days if not collected. I made a special trip and paid for the privilege of opting for collection.

I think it’s ridiculous to charge customers for going to a shop to pick up an order.

We bought hardly anything this Christmas. Pjs for the kids. A few stocking fillers for my youngest. My ds needed a guitar bag and we paid about £30 extra to get it from an independent shop Vs Amazon as it will be well used and we wanted to be sure the guarantee would be honoured. That's about it.

I only buy from shops that have cashiers as I don't want to encourage the sort of soulless warehouse experience described.

I love clothes but end up living in sportswear a lot as you can't really go that far wrong with leggings and a fleece when buying online.

Still thinking about this ... If retailers focus all their efforts on apps, they're going to lose even more customers! Before you can shop with an app, you've got to have the app installed. But when you want to buy something, you don't just consult the apps in your phone. You do an online search or get ideas from articles & posts that you're visiting. You see links to stuff you might like, you click on them, sometimes you buy the thing.

If clicking a link doesn't take you to the product at an online shop but, instead, tells you to install their app, then you're likely to lose interest. How many apps do you want on your phone? How many can it even handle? If I wanted a closer look at some shoes a poster in Style & Beauty linked to, I want to see the sales page for those shoes. I'm not going to spend time downloading and installing an app just in case I like the shoes when I can finally get a look at them (on a tiny screen).

Looks like @PermanentTemporary's right - our retailers are hell-bent on rejecting our custom 😬

I think modern life has demonstrated that in a lot of ways not all change is progress. Shopping was better for people when you had a local shop staffed by a person you knew, who could advise you on what to buy and would probably deliver it personally to your house. My mother remembers a shop near here where you would go in and ask for a simple item, like a jumper. The options would be laid on the counter for you to inspect (cotton or wool, white or blue) and you would choose.

Now we have a lot more choice and possibly things are cheaper, but we have worse service, worse quality, worse human relationships and we’re killing the planet. And all the choice actually makes the experience worse for us because it scrambles our brains and makes us feel unsatisfied.

The balance between the pros and cons of capitalism for ordinary people was reached decades ago, now we have mass consumerism it is all pros for the rich making the profit and cons for the customer.

In our village we actually still have a village shop run by a man whose family have run the same shop for several generations. He is a pillar of the community, helpful and stocks a range of really useful things (unlike most village shops which seem to be 80% booze, crisps and vapes now).

The way to fight back is to buy very sparingly and support shops that behave like relics from the past if you can.

I've been feeling the same and was actually thinking about starting a similar thread, but might as well add to this one.

I'm all for progress when it actually works, but so often it bloody doesn't. I too am frustrated at needing to do everything online, zero customer service, needing an app or QR code to do anything and then not being able to get any help when it goes tits up. It started going this way quickly during Covid for obvious reasons and has carried on going too fast despite some of the technology not being ready. It's depressing and frustrating. For example:

Self service tills in the supermarket. Fine when they work but nearly every shop it bongs because of a weight or other issue & you have to wait for one of the few staff to come & sort it. The other day, an item of fruit had the tag with the bar code missing, couldn't add it manually so called the assistant who told me (quite rudely) that I needed to go and get another one so I had to trapse to the other end of the shop to replace it so I could continue scanning my shopping. Obviously this was because she was meant to be manning the self service tills and there was a lack of staff but previously a member of staff would've been on hand to help.

It's not just shopping, a few others...

Bank branches closing and having to do everything on line. This has mostly been fine as I don't do anything complicated but I recently needed to pay in a cheque (which I rarely do) and the app wouldn't scan it despite my best efforts. A quick Google told me It's a common issue with Samsung & Barclays apparently so my only option is to go to a branch which is 5 miles away and only open when I'm working so God knows when I'll get to go.

Parking apps and no other option to pay, mostly fine as I have most of the common apps on my phone but I was recently in a different area and spent ages trying to download and register on a new app with limited phone signal. Arghh, such a waste of time!

I could go on and on but one final one that frustrated me recently was a group of us went to an escape room where there was a QR code to sign the waiver. Several of us couldn't scan it and there was limited phone signal so we asked if we could sign manually. We were told absolutely not and no waiver = no entry. We were all crammed into a small foyer trying to figure it out and ended up passing round the few phones that worked to enter our details. Massive waste of time!!!

Why is life so bloody hard!!!!

This is such an exaggeration

Yes, West Yorkshire. I will be moving my soft furnishings business in and selling UK produced and/or designed products on behalf of other very small businesses.

Absolutely! Spent £300 there last summer on various pairs of trainers, PE kit, football boots etc. And no bag!!! I was so disgusted that I made my kids carry out their own stacks of shoeboxes whilst muttering that it was a pisstake. I’m sure no one at SD cares a jot about my disgust but made me feel better! It also annoys me that if you order online, it’s £4.99 for standard delivery or £4.99 to collect in store. What’s that about? Would love to boycott them but multiple sporty children means that can be tough 🤦🏻‍♀️

@DelilahBucket exciting news! Will you be in Yorkshire and what will you be selling?

I've got to the stage where I actually enjoy food shopping way better than clothes shopping. At least in a supermarket I pretty much get what I want and if not can easily go to another one in easy distance.

Clothes shopping is a nightmare for me now, I don't know what suits me any more, there are hardly any stores to look at the clothes and driving to the nearest city centre is now around at lest an hour, 20 odd years ago it was about 25 minutes. Then you've got to find somewhere to park and pay the extortionate parking fees.

I have a wedding sometime this year and I'm already stressing about buying something to wear. I'm really not looking forward to it but years ago, I would have loved looking around for clothes and accessories to buy, it was really easy and dare I say it, enjoyable.

High streets are identical from one town to the next. It's as if there's a ticklist.
M&S✅
Boots✅
Superdrug ✅
John Lewis ✅
Next ✅
WH Smith ✅
McDonald's ✅
And many more big chains

I wish we had all those! We have Superdrug, M&S food store, Boots, WH Smith and McDonald’s between the High street and my towns retail outlet.

Definitely no Next or John Lewis or anything similar. Our high street is fairly dead. I tend to go for the banks or the library.

I’d have to travel about 20 minutes to get to a town or city that has all of those stores.

Unfortunately towns and councils have only made properties affordable to the conglomerates. As such we see the same shops across every single town and it's soul destroying.

I'm going against the grain and opening an independent shop soon. I've been an online retailer for over 13 years. I've found it's getting harder and harder to sell online, not necessarily because people aren't shopping, but all the red tape that keeps getting shoved on me day after day. As a shopper, I'm finding online shopping harder and harder. Poor quality goods, things going missing, delivery companies dumping things wherever they please. It's too stressful. I did most of my Christmas shopping in person this year. I went to Leeds city centre where they have a lot of good independent shops. It was so much nicer.

The only way there will be change is if we want it to and those who do open and have independent shops, go out and support them. Yes they are more expensive than B&M and Primark, but that's because they sell better stuff! My next door neighbours raid B&M for tat every week. The amount of stuff they put outside that is broken within a couple of months is unreal.

YANBU! I used to love clothes shopping in person- absolutely loved it.

Hate it now. Nothing is ever in stock, last three times I tried I was told they didnt have it in stock and told me to look online so now thats all I do. Till staff have reduced presumably to reduce costs so you have to queue for ages and parking where I lives costs £15 for 3 hours so it's just no longer worth it for me. Online is easier, returns are easy and I can usually get a discount code online that you cant get in shops.

I see so many people wang on about keeping the high street going but why should I when it costs so much money to park there only to be told to go online anyway? It's a complete waste of my time and money.

Yeah I wonder - it may be because Americans in general have, at least in my experience, friendlier more upbeat dispositions.

@Garlicnorth I have to be fair always associated British businesses with the experience of them being actively annoyed or upset when you attempt to pay, as if taking your money is an insulting process for them that YOU are insisting on.

I had a terrible experience with online delivery at Christmas, from quite a few different companies. Some things didn’t arrive until after Christmas.
That’s it for me now. If it’s not physically available in the shop, I’m just not buying it.

I haven’t bought new clothes for myself for ages (apart from socks, I always seem to get holes and have to replace) - the quality is worse new than my existing clothes that are 10 years+ old, so why would I bother?

I like my local small supermarkets. Yes, they can be more expensive - often not though! But at least they have manned checkouts and aren’t some freezing cold cavernous dimly-lit warehouse where you can’t reach the stuff on the top shelves have to scan your receipt in order to leave.

I've never lived near a town with all those ! My nearest John Lewis must be 80 miles away, ditto IKEA, Costco and shops I would actually like to visit now and then, but none in my entire County. I sometimes wonder at the lack of the aforementioned shops in some areas.

I’ve never gone shopping for fun, not since I was about 16 anyway. Was gobsmacked ages ago to see shopping described (in an American mag) as a ‘leisure pursuit’.

I buy most of my clothes online, from a very few retailers, where delivery is quick and returns are very easy - and I know their sizing. If there’s a Royal Mail option for delivery I choose that, since the post here is very good and reliable.

I do food shopping in person, mostly Asda, but also Sainsbury’s, M&S and Waitrose. I won’t use any supermarket where you’re expected to self-serve a big shop, or there are hardly any staffed checkouts. For a few items I don’t mind.

In the future, there will be only apps.

Fucking hell, how depressing.

I'm seeing quite a lot of 'websites' now that don't work on a browser. They don't scroll, so you only see the top bit, and/or the menus are inactive. I've been assuming they were built by twerps who've absorbed the "mobile first" paradigm without finishing the process, which goes on to adjust for all different kinds of browsing environments. Your reply's made me wonder if the businesses only have apps in reality, and are just serving the same thing to Web browsers.

I'm also wondering whether this is the same everywhere, or is the UK particularly stupid? We seem to be specialising in making it very difficult for customers to buy!