Loss of the consumerist paradise
A recent report published in The Guardian has exposed yet another downside of recession in the United Kingdom (UK), a very advanced industrialised society. It is common knowledge that the joie de vivre of such a society is the insatiable craving for possessing as much of the creature comforts as possible on offer in the market. However, the ongoing financial meltdown has made a deep dent in the purchasing power of consumers.
To overcome this constraint, some errant customers, who reportedly belong mostly to the middle class, have resorted to outright stealing or shoplifting, to be more appropriate. Ironically, this particular group of consumers mentioned in the report have thus compromised the most fundamental principles of civilised social life. Oddly enough, they have not been doing this to meet their basic needs of life. If they had done it purely out of the urge for survival, then one could allow them some benefit of doubt. Sad to say, we hardly have any argument to consider the case here with commiseration.
What a sad turn of events! What has happened to the middle class people, who are supposed to be the guardians of the values on which modern civilised existence hinges! Before one indulges in pitying the despicable state of morality in which the middle class society of the West has found itself, it is first necessary to trace the root cause of this aberrant behaviour on their part.
The report in question has dwelt in further details on the number of such cases of pilfering, the type of merchandise they are making off with, the class of shopping malls where such stealing is taking place and the total value of the commodities being thus filched within a particular period of time.
As noted previously, it is not to meet their basic needs that those consumers have resorted to shoplifting. They have been doing it to keep up with the Joneses; it is exactly here that the root cause of their apparently strange and delinquent manners has to be traced.
The report, which was based on the data provided by a retail security company, showed that ethical clothing shops, especially fashion and food stores, were the target of such thievery. Those types of stores have lost some £4.88 billion to the shoplifters in the past year, until last June. This figure indicates that the frequency of shoplifting is witnessing a surge in recent times.
Though shoplifting is nothing new in Britain, the soaring rate of the crime has sent many thinking what might be the cause of this strange turn of things. The reason, too, as pointed out before, is obvious. It is, of course, one of the upshots of recession. Since it hit the economy, the rate of incidence of this petty crime has gone up by 20 percent during the period under review. The survey data further revealed that fashion clothing stores are worst hit by this kind of customer delinquency, followed by specialty food and convenience stores. The new crop of thieves behind this recession-driven surge in shoplifting consists mostly of novices in the art of stealing.
However, the goods stolen by these rather amateur thieves are expensive items that they presumably cannot afford to buy with their reduced income in these hard times. The picture, however, does not reflect only the behaviour of Britain's middle class consumers. In fact, the survey, which covered 36 countries, invariably showed a similar pattern of behaviour in recession-affected middle class customers.
A very powerful desire drives these middle class people, who, otherwise, are very enlightened, responsible, dignified and honest, to take recourse to stealing. Why so? Because they cannot lose face -- for that matter, their status -- by any means in the society they live! The expensive clothes bearing the tags of the famous brand names that they wear, pricey foods they eat, precious ornaments they wear, costly cars they drive and the exclusive clubs they frequent measure the status that they so hanker after. It is this craze for such status symbols that has moulded the consumerist psyche of the advanced economies. To these people, losing that status is losing everything, which is why they think nothing of even stealing!
In the maelstrom of financial meltdown, the affluent nations have tumbled into a strange reality. With the pride and complacency of assured prosperity gone, the values they prided themselves on for so long are also fast fading out. The edifice of consumer culture is now in a desperate predicament. The shock of recession has laid it bare in all its hollowness. Now, all its victims -- the rich, the poor, the industrialists, the small business operators, the working and the middle class, the executive and the upper class -- are pointing the finger as one at the prevailing social and economic system for their present plight.
That the disillusionment with market capitalism is at its peak, even two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, has been made obvious through a recent poll conducted by BBC World Service and its associates. A large portion of those interviewed, (43 percent in France, 38 percent in Mexico and 35 percent in Brazil and on average 23 percent of all the 27 countries covered by the poll) viewed that free market capitalism was fatally flawed and should be replaced with a new economic order. Yet, 51 percent of all polled believed free market capitalism should be regulated and reformed.
The survey and the poll results speak for themselves and their results converge. The lure of the consumerist paradise is gradually proving to be a chimera.
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