:: The Wendy House ::

Intoxicated purchasing skills have long been a British talent.

These skills are best observed after 3pm (Pub closing time) on Christmas Eve (last day shopping day before Christmas). I discovered this while working as an 20yr old shop assistant in a major city centre ladies fashion outlet, TopShop (1983). Working on Christmas eve paid 3x the standard hourly rate. Employees would rather have the day off to avoid the hassle and be with family (in the pub?). I didnt see it coming. My job description definitely hadn’t included handling drunken purchasers. Drunken male purchasers often want to be ‘handled’ by young female shop assistants and they normally shop in same-gender parties of 2 or more. This created a challenging business environment for a young gal. I learned how to:

• quickly identify which Brit. has a need to buy a gift for one of the gals in his life.
• prevent party members from falling over, puking on merchandise, or pulling-out anything other than a wallet from their trousers.
• herd the non-purchasing members of the party to a position where they will cause minimum disruption to other customers & parties.
• avoid getting groped or having to call for back-up.
• focus the intoxicated Brit. on making a purchase decision. Identify viable ‘gifts’ by asking targetted, ‘un-innuendo-able’* questions about the recipient of the gift.
• move the purchaser to the till (US = check-out) before he looses consciousness or pukes.

*This proved virtually impossible because the answers to necessary questions are a major source of hilarity to the intoxicated purchaser. For example, what ’size’ does she normally wear? Has to be asked, prior to completing a satisfactory purchase. The intoxicated, debatably humorous, retorts to this question varied inexhaustibly with every question-phrasing variation I tried.

Intoxicated Brits know the shop assistants agenda and take pleasure in ‘teasing’. It becomes a very intricate game. For example,

• how to stay in the store without prompting the shop assistant to escalate for back-up, or
• How many levels of back-up can they produce before calling the police is even mentioned. Apparantly, with the exception of the police, each level of back-up heightens the entertainment value. Probably because it adds more female shop-workers to the mix.

The British have recently extended these shopping skills to the internet and cunningly taken advantage of the new physical context to ‘get their kit off’. Another popular British passtime, despite the unpredictable weather. I suspect internet purchasing is socially less satisfying than teasing shop assistants. These purchasers probably subscribe to other internet services to satisfy their social needs.

Combine internet purchasing with the disturbing trend of corporations cynically marketing alcohol to children and you’ve got drunk kids purchasing online. Add the potential for extended opening hours and handling drunken purchasers may become a part of the shop assistants job description…

W prefers-shopping-sober-by-proxy (its cheaper)