Well, certainly a High Street near me looks set to lose at least three more shops in the very near future, and there are already so many shops lying empty. The local council has tried to tart up the vacant windows with displays of art and in some cases they’ve papered the whole window with posters of the area from the past so that you can see what the shop frontages looked like in Victorian times. It’s better than nothing I suppose but the fact remains that towns all over the country are dying on their feet.
The news that Habitat is closing down brought back memories for me of the days before we got married as I used to shop at the Glasgow branch of the shop in the 1970s. Then it was all new and snazzy and the only place to get something really different and modern. I hadn’t been to a Habitat for years so when I found myself in the Edinburgh shop a couple of years ago I got a real shock.
I had been able to afford to buy things for my ‘bottom drawer’ at Habitat when I wasn’t earning very much and I was supporting a student fiance, in fact I still have some of the things which I bought then. Baskets and enamel ware and even a dhurrie rug are some of the things still being used 30 odd years on. So I was quite amazed at the prices which Habitat were asking for things which I could have got much cheaper elsewhere – gone were the days when their designs were different from anything else available, but whoever was running Habitat at the time obviously hadn’t realised that the goods on offer were run-of-the-mill things with eye watering price tags. Needless to say I haven’t been back to the shop since then.
If everybody else had the same experience that I had it isn’t a surprise that they’ve stopped trading. It’s sad though, I suppose they needed another Terence Conran to shake it all up.
Speaking of ‘bottom drawers’! I mentioned the phrase to my prospective daughter-in-law recently and she didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. In fact I think she thought I was being a bit rude – I suppose the word ‘drawers’ does have sort of lewd comedy connotations!
Anyway, the upshot of the conversation was that young women nowadays do not have ‘bottom drawers’. My mother started my bottom drawer when I was only 5 years old. She bought guest towels for me! I was the third daughter (and she didn’t like girls) and not so much an afterthought as an aftershock! So I suppose it’s reasonable to say that she was very much looking forward to the day when she would get me off her hands and safely married off to – anyone. Sadly, she didn’t make me any patchwork quilts, I think traditionally you were supposed to have about ten of them before you could safely say that you were well kitted out for your new life of drudgery. It’s probably my upbringing but I think there’s something quite comforting about a bottom drawer – just as well I didn’t have a daughter!
My cousin came to Philadelphia to shop this past weekend and we were talking about the same thing. Target used to have interesting things by name designers at affordable prices, but now their things are much more expensive and less interesting. Ditto for Banana Republic, J. Crew, and The Gap. Everything is the same, not good quality, but expensive. I shop the discount stores we have here, like Marshalls, Ross, and T..J. Maxx, where, at least, the name brands are less, if the quality isn’t as good. My oldest clothes and household items are much better quality than similarly priced items available today, and I certainly couldn’t afford to pay an arm and a leg for them when I bought them twenty and thirty years ago.
Joan,
It’s nice (I think!) that you have the same problems with shops that we have. I haven’t bought anything from Gap because everything seems to have their name emblazoned across it and I hate that, I don’t want to advertise for them for free! We don’t have any of the others near here except TK. Maxx. It’s good for household things and sometimes clothes. You’re right about things being shoddy. So much stuff is made in China now and they don’t seem to have any quality control. I wanted to buy an enamel mirror compact as a gift but none of them had the enamel complete so they looked second-hand. The assistant was very snooty about it and I said that I wouldn’t mind paying double the price if it was perfect. She didn’t get a sale!