Never judge a shopper by the brand name on their bags!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Walking down Dominick Street, I’m carrying a Marks & Spencer’s bag in one hand and a Lidl bag in the other. Make of me what you will, oh casual observer. The Lidl bag is enormous, so does that mean I do all my shopping there?

Who cares? Maybe I have the money to shop at Marks and maybe I just want to be seen to. Unlikely, admittedly, that your colyoomist gives a toss about what others think about where I shop, but there are people out there … ‘snobs’, they used to be called.

As a tiny lad back in the 1960s, your scribbler was given a fantastic definition of snobbery. Coming from the upper echelons of the English middle classes, it was, in itself, inherently snobbish. I was told that a snob is someone who looks down their nose at someone else, when they have no right to look down upon that person.

The tacit inference therefore was that there were other people who did have a right to look down on others.

Gradually and thankfully, a snob became anybody who looked down on another, and rightly so, because to do so is unjust.

Anyway, if my shopping patterns are anything to go by, you should never judge a person by their Bags For Life. I might be dead posh and do my entire weekly grocery shop in Marks & Sparks, and equally I might fill my boots at Lidl, Dunnes or SuperValu.

So why this fixation with bagly brand recognition? Well, I worked in retail for many happy years, but encountered in that industry such a level of customer snobbery that I am still to this day outraged and perplexed.

Many years ago I opened a charity shop in Galway City, and having grown up in a family of shop workers, I knew that it was important to put our brand name out there on the streets. So I ordered a batch of printed carrier bags, only to be told by my Head Office that nobody would ever carry a charity bag onto the streets of Galway.

Why not? I just couldn’t understand. Rather than an embarrassment, I thought it would earn the customer kudos for having made a contribution to the charity.

A few weeks into the job, I realised that I been wrong and Head Office right. In fact, the situation was worse than I could ever imagine.

Several regular customers bought a good deal of clothing and then carefully folded their new belongings into Moons bags.

My oh my, how I had overestimated the social conscience of Ireland. Not only did they not want to be seen to contribute to a charity shop, they needed to pretend that they’d bought their clothes in a posh one.

Snobbery, pure and simple. Sad but true. Yet these days, even though the phenomenon thrives, the word ‘snobbery’ barely exists. The predictive texting on my Nokia phone recognises the word ‘Lidl’, but not ‘snobbery’. Yikes! The Frasier Crane snob in me suddenly feels I must have the wrong phone!

Does my blend of bags, this visual cocktail of budget and luxury retail brands, mean I’m a societal mess? Well, I’m a supermarket whore. I go where the sun shines brightly. I go where the parking is easy, the produce is fresh and the prices dandy.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.