Spending money: shopping

The British are not very adventurous shoppers. They like reliability and buy brand-name goods wherever possible, preferably with the price clearly marked (they are not very keen on haggling over prices). It is therefore not surprising that a very high proportion of the country’s shops are branches of chain stores.

Visitors from northern European countries are sometimes surprised by the shabbiness of shop-window displays, even in prosperous areas. This is not necessarily a sign of economic depression. It is just that the British do not demand art in their shop windows. In general, they have been rather slow to take on the idea that shopping might actually be fun. On the positive side, visitors are also sometimes struck by the variety of types of shop. Independent shopowners feel no need to follow conventional ideas about what a particular shop does and doesn’t sell.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century supermarkets began moving out of town, where there was lots of free parking space. As they did so, they became bigger, turning into “hypermarkets” stocking a wider variety of items. For example, most of them now sell alcoholic drinks, which are conventionally bought at shops called “off-licenses”. They also sell petrol and some items traditionally found in chemists and newsagents.

However, this trend has not gone as far as it has in some other European countries. For example, few supermarkets sell clothes, shoes, kitchen utensils or electrical goods. They still concentrate mainly on everyday needs.

The area in town where the local shops are concentrated is known as the high street (the American equivalent is “Main Street”). British high streets have suffered from the move towards out-of-town shopping. In the worst-affected towns, as many as a quarter of the shops in the high street are vacant. But high streets have often survived by adapting. In larger towns, shops have tended to become either more specialized or to sell especially cheap goods (for people who are too poor to own a car and drive out of town). Many have become charity shops (selling second-hand items and staffed by volunteers) and discount stores.

Even most small high streets still manage to have at least one representative of the various kinds of conventional food shop (such as butcher, grocer, fishmonger, greengrocer), which do well by selling more expensive luxury items.

The survival of the high street has been helped by the fact that department stores have been comparatively slow to move out of town. Almost every large town of suburb has at least one of these. They are usually not chain stores and each company runs a maximum of a few branches in the same region.

Shop opening hours

The normal time for shops to open is nine in the morning. Large out-of-town supermarkets stay open all day until about eight o’clock

Most small shops stay open all day and then close at half past five or a bit later. In fact, over the last twenty-five years, shop-opening hours have become more varied. Regulations have been relaxed. It is now much easier than it used to be to find shops open after six. In some areas the local authorities are encouraging high street shops to stay open very late on some evenings as a way of putting new life into their “dead” town centers.

But the most significant change in recent years has been with regard to Sundays. By the early 1990s many shops, including chain stores, were opening on some Sundays, especially in the period before Christmas. In doing this they were taking a risk with the law. Sometimes they were taken to court, sometimes not. The rules were so old and confused that nobody really knew what was and what wasn’t legal. It was agreed that something had to be done. On one side were the “Keep Sunday Special” lobby, a group of people from various Christian churches and trade unions. They argued that Sunday should be special, a day of rest, a day for all the family to be together. They also feared that Sunday-opening would mean that shop workers would be forced to work too many hours. On the other side were a number of lobbies, especially people from women’s and consumer groups. They argued that working women needed more than one day (Saturday) in which to rush around doing the shopping. In any case, they argued, shopping was also something that the whole family could do together. In 1993 Parliament voted on the matter. By a small majority, the idea of a complete “free-for-all” was defeated. Small shops are allowed to open on Sundays for as long as they like, but large shops and supermarkets can only open for a maximum of six hours.