Laura’s Bureau

As the credit crunch has become the credit crisis, everyone finds it funny now. We are all finding ways to laugh about it.

And consumers are still consuming. They are, however, making the move from the ‘finest’ to the ‘basic’ ranges. Times may be hard and getting harder, but the nation is tucking into continental meats from Lidl and will soon be dousing itself – or drinking – ‘Eruption’, the store’s quality after-shave. Shopping is still the nation’s favourite past-time.

This week in the West Midlands – that most grim of England’s regions that has not one but at least three of the worst cities in the country on many of the measures available – 3,000 people queued overnight to be the first in line for the opening of a new Currys megastore with promises of a half-price sat nav system that would help guide them around the traffic jam they had created.

Had this been a city-centre store rather than an out of town store, those queuing may have had to listen to one of the many preachers who tell shoppers of their sins through megaphones, coaxing them out of Woolworths and into the preachers’ own deluded worlds. Scientologists try this more quietly by whisking shoppers away with the promise of a stress test, a cup of tea and a stranger kind of salvation.

But does shopping need the kind of religious salvation that these preachers promise? Would it not be better if those who knew about the economic order of the world got out their megaphones and preached Stiglitz?

Instead of ‘God’, ‘Jesus is Lord’ or ‘Be More Cause in Life’ sewn over the go-faster stripes of their tracksuit bottoms, these preachers could have ‘Tiny little prices = tiny little fingers’ instead. ‘It is not just the mushroom factory lighting in TK Maxx that makes it hard to see,’ they could shout. ‘Free yourself and the rest of the high street will follow.’

We need some Stiglitz preachers.