TEN LOCKDOWN LESSONS FOR LIFE

Lockdown was horrendous but it also forced us to adapt and see things differently. So what are the key lessons we can take with us into the post Covid world?

10. Shopping

Hopefully, we now realise that shopping was never just about getting hold of more ‘stuff’. In fact, now that we’ve had a year-long Spring clean of our drawers and cupboards we are acutely aware that we don’t need any more stuff…ever again. And if you’ve given any of those over-entitled TikTokkers their daily fix of attention, you’ll surely need to hang out with a few civilised adults gently browsing and squeezing vegetables, instead of gyrating provocatively to a misogynist bass-line. The derisory term ‘shopping’ is too small a word for what is actually a nuanced dance of social validation. Consumption in a vacuum is kind of meaningless. 

9. Twinkling

Lockdown has proven how important eye contact is to our needy little species. With most of our face covered we’ve been forced to switch our eyes to full twinkle mode in order to maximise our social acceptance rating. When we’re finally allowed to lose the masks let’s not lose the twinkling.

8. School

One of the biggest lessons we learnt…was about lessons. Zoom-school was fun for a bit but without the peer pressure to either concentrate or take the piss we just switched off. Ask your kids to name three things they learnt in a Zoom class. 

Precisely.

7. Home

Amazing really, that after ten thousand years of civilisation it took 2020 to remind us that our home is where the heart is. A cliche, but nonetheless true. Our homes reminded us they are not just the places we kip in before commuting off to work. A luxury urban apartment that promises a contemporary lifestyle, whatever that is, is not a home. Homes are the real us. Our solace, our comfort, our security. Now go clean that filthy sink.

6. Work

Being forced off the train to be left disorientated on the platform we started to realise that being on the train wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be, after all. Our work/life dial definitely shifted a few notches. However, work ultimately gives us our status and it’s difficult to feel significant in rank whilst perched on the end of a divan with a Dell Inspiron warming our knees. Turns out all that inefficient time gossiping around the water cooler builds stronger bonds than anything gleaned from a zillion Zoom calls. Oh, and for the record, a Zoom drinks party is not a party.

5. John, my Butcher

Now that we’ve had to establish ourselves in our local community our priorities have drastically changed. Previously, we might have smugly asserted that we barely go into town, and certainly never on a Saturday. But post Covid we make a concerted effort, not just to shop at the local butcher but to drop his name into the conversation, because we have learnt that this is the most valuable local currency ever invented. If, by some miracle, John the butcher actually uses our name, well that’s like winning the bloody lottery. Forget Bitcoin. This currency is soaring in value and is accepted at any of your local high street shops. It’s a surefire investment, so if you’re interested in dabbling, it’s called Community Spirit.


4. Christmas (and Easter, birthdays, Shrove Tuesday etc etc)

Believe it or not, there once was a time when the elite would roll their high IQ eyeballs at annual celebrations as an irritant that gets in the way of the god given right to earn a living. With plenty of damning evidence they would accuse Christmas of being an over commercialised money grab that comes around way too often, and worse, for longer each time. Well, talk about a turnaround. Lockdown must have smuggled in the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future, for even the Scroogiest of Scrooges can now see the joy of annual family gatherings. I for one plan to follow the gorgeous Mrs Silver in Roald Dahl’s Esio Trot, and ensure my tree’s up and fully dressed by the first of August.

3. The Fear Salesman

If I had titled this blog The Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow, then you can be sure that only my mother, were she still alive, would bother to read it. (and then it would be only to check my grammar). My vain hope is that once the frenzy we’ve been whipped into subsides a little, once the fog of fear has lifted, we will realise just how much we are manipulated by the media. And that includes social media, with Facebook, Google and Youtube literally banning dissent or doubt from the mainstream narrative. This relentless catastrophisation is not just wrong, it’s wicked. Shame on the Doom-mongers, for we know now what your game is.

2. The Pub

Like this needed saying, but apparently it does. Pubs are not just dispensers of beer. Lockdown did not starve us of beer. (In fact, we’ve been drinking more of it than ever before.) No, lockdown starved us of the pub: the social levelling institution that is the foundation of British society. (I realise that substituting the word bar, for my international audience, doesn’t quite cut the mustard, but bear with me.) Few relationships, if any, whether family, sexual or business were ever nurtured without the assistance of a pub in the equation somewhere along the line. Pubs, literally and metaphorically, lubricate society and without them we have been grinding our collective gnashers for far too long. Enough said.

1. Other People

Our year in prison has taught us so much about other people. Firstly, they are stupid. They can’t follow instructions, can’t wear masks properly and refuse to stand two metres away. They gather in the park when they shouldn’t, hold illegal barbecues and tea parties in the garden and as soon as the sun comes out they rush in their multitudes to the beach like the very waves they crave. They are arrogant, cocky to the point of reckless, and downright dangerous. They are also timid, paranoid and so unbelievably jumpy that frankly they should never leave the house ever again. Some of them relish the opportunity to tell us off (see my piece on Mini Tyrants) while others can’t do enough to parade their complete and supine compliance. Our loved ones are beyond irritating, especially when you’ve listened to their stupid little sayings for 365 days on the trot. But however annoying, paranoid and cocky they may be we miss them all so very much. We are desperate to reconnect with the ugly, stupid, contradictory human race because…well, it’s where we belong.

Please feel free to add your own lockdown lessons. Then follow me on Twitter @retailfuturist for daily insights and wry musings.

  Howard Saunders   Apr 15, 2021   Future, me age, Retail, shopping   0 Comment   Read More

DEAR BORIS

We need your help urgently, but the good news is we want you to do absolutely nothing.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that retail and hospitality have been utterly devastated since the C-word arrived, but I’ll tell you anyway. Only the richest stores will survive, only restaurants with serious cash in the bank will make it through. Hundreds of thousands of our shops, bars, pubs, clubs and restaurants will never reopen I’m afraid, but by doing absolutely nothing you can save them.

The truth is, the pandemic has hurried along the inevitable. It has reached into the future, grabbed it around its stupid, skinny neck and dragged it kicking and screaming right onto the doorstep of number ten. But don’t worry,  I have the solution.

I don’t have to spell it out but, sod it, I will: The economy is like a giant flashy wristwatch: an incredibly complex but highly sensitive mechanism that’s taken centuries to find its natural rhythm. Some of it runs fast and smooth while other bits clunk along reluctantly, but when it’s working it interconnects every single one of us so that the girl that bakes the bread for the sandwiches that feed the railway workers that get the trains rolling that take commuters to their offices to design and make the stuff they sell in the shops to enable our lovely baker to buy the things she needs to keep her life ticking along nicely. Well, that’s the idea anyway.

But over the last few years, with each new regulation, with each incremental increase in rent and rates, we could only respond by passing on the extra costs to our increasingly bewildered customers. There’s a clue something’s going awry when it costs the best part of five quid for a basic double decaf latte with mocha sprinkles.

On top of all this, national chains with hilariously ambitious spreadsheets often paid above market rents, which in turn hiked the prices for the rest of us. Increased rents meant increased business rates and so click by click the delicate mechanism was ratcheted tighter and tighter until…well, you know what happened.

(By the way, when you next bump into Rishi please thank him for all his help. Getting paid to watch movies for a year was a bit of a novelty at first, but now everyone’s completed Netflix, frankly we’re bored witless.)

Please don’t think this is a plea from a special interest group or a specific corner of the market whining for extra help. No. Our high streets, our shops and restaurants are the lifeblood of everybody’s community. No one will be unaffected by the retail apocalypse when the shockwave hits later this year. Reality bites and this time it will leave a fatal wound, for sure.

Look, I get it. I get that you need to increase taxes. I even get that we don’t really have to balance the books like a household budget because it’s more important to show a decent long term credit record. (Otherwise what sort of a madman would spend £100 billion on HS2??) I also understand it’s all about legacy, but here’s the thing, we’re at a crossroads now Boris. Continue where we left off in March 2020 and you will be remembered as the PM who ushered in the era of the ghost town, the tumbleweed community, the lost generation…you get my drift. You enjoyed the taxes when times were good but, let’s be honest, taxes are brakes on growth. And no sane person could believe our communities need slowing down right now.

That’s why I’m asking you to do nothing: Abolish business rates, simple as that. Stop the clipboard army of surveyors and measurers, calculators, adjusters and valuers. Stop the rate reviews, rate review delays and banish the rate collectors. (The cost of the admin-mechanism must be…well, hundreds of millions alone). Imagine, bringing an end to the endless fighting, disputing, negotiating and renegotiating, all of it solved overnight. By you.

And please don’t consider rates holidays or strategic delays to our punishment. Telling a child you won’t slap it until next year does not make for a well balanced upbringing.

Boris, simply remove your foot from our collective necks, stand back and fold your arms as the whoosh of energy tousles your iconic mop. Oh yes, it will be instant. Watch as our lungs balloon with oxygen, our eyes snap open and the entrepreneur in us awakens, alive with the long forgotten electricity of enthusiasm. No longer will our towns feel locked down by the likes of Costa and WH Smith. Given the chance we shall reclaim them. Our children and our children’s children will once again grow up knowing that their local high street really is theirs, and that one day they may bring their own ideas to market. 

Unlocking our nation of shopkeepers Boris, this should be your legacy. Unleashing the army, not of taxers, naysayers, measurers and restricters, but the gargantuan hidden army of muffin makers, cake bakers and dressmakers, the sandwich toasters, chicken roasters, electronic fixers, baristas and cocktail mixers alongside specialists in house cleaning, dog preening and bao bun steaming. These people, these are the good people that will get the arteries of Britain pumping again, and only you can make it happen. 

Do nothing Boris, that’s what we want. Nothing is more important right now.

These images of closed and shuttered shops and restaurants were taken on the anniversary of our first lockdown, in Kensington, Chelsea and Soho, the UK’s wealthiest postcodes.

Follow me on Twitter @retailfuturist for daily insights and wry musings.

  Howard Saunders   Mar 24, 2021   Uncategorized   0 Comment   Read More

LETTER TO AMERICA

Oh how I worry about you. I worry about your health, your moods, your mind. I worry that your once resolute railroad has become the rails for runaway rolling stock, gathering steam and trundling inexorably towards the abyss like a clip from Road Runner. Beep beep.

You’ve had a very tough year, I get that. We all witnessed the ping pong picture of outrage as reality was batted back and forth, back and forth, CNN to Fox and back again as if the battle could ever be won.

I think of you as a good friend, so please understand this letter is well meaning. I lived at your epicentre for four full years, on the corner of 22nd & 5th where Broadway slices Fifth Avenue to form the triangular land that gave birth to the Flatiron building. From a few floors up I would look down upon your angry yellow traffic with a gentle smile. I knew that your incessant haste and irritable horn-honking was nothing more than the grouchiness of the engineer in charge of the world’s greatest engine. I did my best not to pester you, as I could see you were busy.

It was a privilege to know you back then. I arrived the evening before Hurricane Sandy stormed in and I witnessed your patience and stoicism as everyone pulled together to face the crisis. The streets were shattered and deserted then too, but somehow you kept your New York cool. 

This time it’s different. More recently your temper has become unbearable. Of course the pandemic was a massive blow, as it was to all of us that watch you from afar, but as Spring turned to Summer your rage only worsened. Outrage after outrage left you with windows smashed, shops burned and looted, families with lost livelihoods and yet still your anger fumes within you. Like a possessed teenager your shame turned to even more anger and more outrage. To be honest with you, we turned our backs and looked away in the hope that you would come to your senses.

Don’t get me wrong, we owe you so very much. From rock ’n roll to Hollywood, from Elvis to Monroe you can out-icon anybody. You gifted us our twentieth century: art, music, film, literature, animation, even the pizza and burgers we got fat on are all yours. Your technology took us to the moon and gave us the phones and laptops we’re staring at now. But your clever technology also created the social networks that fuel your outrage and the self doubt that eats away at your soul. 

Please listen to me. Your mood swings must stop. The good people that became our New York friends have moved upstate or further afield to warmer, saner climes. These people truly loved you and spoke with pride of living with you in what felt like the centre of the universe. They were actors, traders, property agents, dancers, entrepreneurs, all of them genuine, branded-to-the-core-like-Coney-Island-rock, lovers of New York, New York. They may never return. Your golden glow you see, the glow that made it worth paying a lol price for a double decaf latte with soy, has faded. 

The same is true on your West Coast. Gentle folk are abandoning Los Angeles and San Francisco and leaving it to the permanently angry, the borderline insane and the perpetually terrified. It is not good news.

So from Fifth Avenue to Rodeo Drive your stores, bars and restaurants, your markets and food halls lie in wait for visitors to return. Once bustling breweries and bakeries, bars and boutiques sit silently, patiently behind corrugated clothes. Sadly, many will not live to see daylight again. 

But daylight will return and when finally you do open your doors, when Spring releases the pastel clad yoga girls who skip to the jazz of the rattling trolleys, when the reassuring aroma of Starbucks and McDonalds wafts awake your bleary avenues, when the streets squeak again to the lolloping cabs and silly-sized Suburbans, and when your manholes can once again puff furiously like it’s their very first cigar, only then will we know that you’re back. 

Please, please come to your senses. We miss you so very much.

Follow me on Twitter @retailfuturist for daily insights and musings.

  Howard Saunders   Feb 16, 2021   Uncategorized   0 Comment   Read More