Westfield Shopping centre - Ye Gods!
Cressers
Posts: 1,329
Did you see the news on the opening last night? Did you see them running, running to get in? Did you hear the two brain donors they interviewed? "I'm helping the economy by shopping" and "when the going gets tough the tough go............... shopping"
There are times I despair...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14022954
There are times I despair...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14022954
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Keep reading, it gets worse...
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/ ... ng-mall.do
And worse...
http://www.onenewspage.co.uk/video/2011 ... n-2012.htm
The first stage of gentrification that is.
That second clip is truly frightening, it's like a chris morris skit. No wonder a nation can be led into wars/unquestionably vote tory if the populace are so mind controlled.
And coincidentally i'd just been reading william blakes London, which seems apt
"I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:"
Anyway i'm off to lidl.
momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
I'm afraid you are being terribly naive! What you want is more making leading to more spending. Not just the spending bit - on its own, all that does is export wealth in exchange for importing tat. Westfield is probably doing some good for the Asian economy though.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ghost-Milk-Call ... 0241144353
Making wealth or products? It doesn't really matter what we produce, be it goods or services, but yes we need to create something that other markets want in order to pay for our imports. In the short term though, consumers not spending isn't going to help anyone.
The problem being that, in the long term, consumers spending isn't going to help anyone (unless we do the making as well).
No point encouraging short term spending unless there is a long term plan behind it. Lack of this sort of thinking is exactly why we are in the mess we are in.
eg tax cuts - encourage spending but result in lost tax revenue (unless the money lost by the tax cut is more than equalled by the increase in spend caused by it), people end up poorer and usually have nothing valuable to show for it (because, anything they need and can afford, they probably own - tax cuts are only going to encourage spending on censored you don't need).
+1, you surely can't spend on credit to get yourself out of an issue caused by spending too much on credit.
I'm not disgreeing with you regarding long term, but as I said halting spending in the short term will not benefit anyone. I didn't say we should all go crazy with our credit cards in John Lewis.
You promote free market consumerism and that's whatcha get!
Reasonably interesting article on the role of the materialism in the UK's position as the worst place to bring up a child in the developed world*
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/ ... istic-trap
* Say Unicef
No, I know you aren't! The point is that the short term doesn't benefit anyone either unless you can back it up with something.
You'll only gain by short term spending if you plan on being dead before the long term
Until then I lived 2 miles from Thurrock Lakeside.
It staggered me the amount of people who, on wonderfully warm and sunny days (and within reasonable distance of some great countryside), opted to drag themselves and their poor kids into that place for hours (if not days) on end.
Free-flowing traffic on Staurdays, Sundays and bank hols was non-existent.
My mate said to me once that shopping and possessions are the new gods....
The place is a Cathedral to this - it even has a spire...
http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?q=thurro ... =123&ty=58
As Keynes pointed out, "The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead."
momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
It'll just destroy another high street or 10. How many towns do we have now with dozens of boarded up shops?
You've never bought anything off the Internet then?
Yeah, mainly because so many specialist shops around here have closed. I never bought anything off the Net before '05.
Specialist shops have survived by going onto the internet themselves. I moved away from the high street because local councils seemed to be utterly determined to make getting into town centres as difficult and as costly as possible.