It seemed simple enough. It even seemed like a good idea. Something I had done before and not struggled with, an easy way to earn my Good Citizen badge for the day.
On my regular route to a local megastore, I pass a garage with a carwash. For some inexplicable reason, the footpath next to the carwash has become a dumping ground for supermarket trollies. Without fail, every time I make my way through this pass, there is an abandoned trolley, standing askew. I have puzzled as to why this particular place is where someone consistently no longer has need of the trolley that they apparently did need to take out of the supermarket carpark, but the logic escapes me. Still, given that I am able-bodied and on my way to the very megastore to which the abandoned trollies belong, I always take hold of the forsaken four-wheeler and push it back to its home.
On this particular occasion, in the hiatus between Christmas and New Year, I happened upon no less than four of them, nosing each other like abandoned dogs in the underpass. Can I manage four? I mused to myself. Of course I can, beamed my gym-going, over-confident self. Four trollies will be a breeze. Of course, I hadn’t factored in the treacherous nature of supermarket trolley-wheels combined with a sharp corner, heavy traffic and a steep slope: nevertheless, I eventually made it to the trolley park, breathless but triumphant. The park was completely empty of trollies. I kid you not, not one single person appeared to have returned their trolley to its rightful home on that day. In smiling possession of four, I was thus immediately set upon by multiple shoppers, all of them making a grab for one of the trollies I had brought. You’re welcome!
I grant you that it is all too easy to bemoan the state of modern Britain, but sometimes it’s the little things that get you down. I’m not sure if I can put a date upon when the shift occurred, but I’m sure that there were indeed halcyon days when people dutifully returned their trollies to the trolley park for the benefit of others. At the risk of sounding a little deranged, I’ve been pondering this for a week or more: when and why did people stop thinking that they had to return their trolley? After much musing, I think I’ve hit upon the source of the problem. It isn’t a symptom of poor parenting, it isn’t the state of our schools and it isn’t that people have somehow become inherently worse than they used to be. The issue, I believe, is that very few of us do our shopping in anything that even remotely resembles a community any more.
When my parents speak of their youth (a timespan ranging from the mid 1930s to the post-war period), both of them talk about local shops and local tradespeople. Everyone knew everyone else’s business, for better or for worse, and local businesses were at the very heart of the community. Shops and services were run by people you knew and that meant that those shops and services were places that expected and demanded respect and acknowledgement. Shop-owners were not a faceless corporation, they were members of the inner circle. If some local scallywag caused trouble for a local shopkeeper, there would be consequences and those consequences would have an impact on family and friends.
In such a community, it was shameful to be caught doing something thoughtless, because reports of such behaviour would be shared with other members of the neighbourhood. Both my parents recall being known to all the adults in their area and they can acknowledge both the privileges and the responsibilities that came with that fact. The privileges included feeling safe and looked after in their community, the sense that they could knock on anyone’s door at any time and ask for help; the responsibilities included knowing that any misdemeanours would get straight back to their parents! It suddenly occurred to me that very few of us feel either looked after or indeed feel judged and monitored in this way any more.
Very few of us feel vulnerable to any sense of shame about our routine behaviours, because we move through the world so anonymously, or at least we feel as if we do. Small acts of selfishness such as dumping our trolley at the side of the street will rarely if ever receive any kind of direct challenge or lasting consequence. As a result, people have gradually and unconsciously learned that they can get away with such thoughtless behaviour without an impact on their own lives. I honestly don’t believe that we are any less innately thoughtful than we used to be — it doesn’t make sense for such a seismic change in human nature to have happened so quickly; rather, it is the case that we operate in a world that does not expect us to be thoughtful and in which there are no consequences for our thoughtless behaviour.
There is so much to regret with the loss of local shopping: when I think of all the hand-wringing that is done about the state of the environment, so much of that could be solved or at least mitigated against if we simply went back to local stores. Out-of-town supermarkets started to become the norm somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s and I would argue that this caused a shift in people’s attitude towards buying produce. At one stroke, we started to feel like we were giving our money to big corporations, nameless and faceless profiteers that we all began to resent whilst at the same time demanding more and more of their wares. Within the next two generations came the internet and online delivery, meaning we didn’t even have to leave our homes to give our money to invisible people. As a result of all of this, retail as a concept has taken on an identity of its own and is completely detached from humanity.
When we do leave our houses to circulate around the premises that such corporations set up for their customers, the distate on all sides is palpable. Despite what the advertisements would have us believe, it is obvious that customers feel no liking nor obligation towards such corporations and likewise the companies themselves display barely-concealed disdain towards their customers. Buying and selling now operates in an open atmosphere of mutual contempt. If you think I’m exaggerating, then perhaps you’ve never shopped in a large megastore in one of the poorest parts of the country. To quote the words of Jarvis Cocker in his 1995 classic, Common People, “I can’t see anyone else smiling in here.” Nobody smiles and nobody talks to each other. Everyone beats a path to the automated check-outs so they don’t have to interact with a human being before they leave the store. Virtually everything is tagged because theft is so rife, another consequence of people feeling so detached from their store-merchants: research indicates that most people now believe shoplifting to be a victimless crime.
But before we get too depressed, let’s all resolve to do better. While we might indeed be forking out our money to a giant company we don’t care for, in itself owned by one of the handful of global corporations that appear to own and control the entire universe, let us not forget that within those conglomerates there are hundreds and thousands of individual people like us, people who work and shop on their premises. Let us not lose sight of our individual humanity, which I believe we still possess in bucketloads: it is simply that we are operating in a world that makes us feel isolated and unmoored, disconnected from the sometimes bewildering number of other humans that move around us. As the population increases, there is a painful irony in the fact that we all seem to feel more and more alone inside it. But as just a tiny drop in what could be a potential antidote, how about this for a New Year’s resolution? Next time you see an abandoned trolley and you’re heading towards its homeland, why not pick it up and take it with you? You might be surprised how good it makes you feel.
