Ethical Consumption in the Socialist Imaginary

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

Since its advent in the 1990s, globalization has transformed the world. One of its many notable effects was the further siloing of consumers from the labor that produced their goods and services. Increasingly complex global supply chains alongside deceptive advertising make it nearly impossible to uncover every step in a product’s production and distribution. Of course, strategic clarification of these processes would come to represent its own form of advertising, as the professed “social and environmental values of consumer products” became reliable selling points in and of themselves. This was mainly due to an increase in consumer consciousness — spurred by globalization’s poster child, the internet — that begged for opportunities to consume “ethically.”

Though such “ethical consumption” marked an improvement over previous consumptive practices, a socialist lens reveals its limitations. As socialists understand, capitalist production relies on the exploitation of workers by capital owners, meaning that no level of consciousness or self-awareness on the part of traditional companies can shed their fundamentally unethical character. Even in instances where a worker’s experience with their employer is satisfactory — as can happen when receiving a high salary or wage, robust benefits, or other perks — the company’s simultaneous profiteering is more than just a harmless manifestation of mutual benefit. The very act of turning a profit beyond that which would sufficiently refinance operating costs is one of theft, particularly of the value that the worker has produced via their labor. This surplus value is not returned to the worker nor does it serve operational ends. It instead comprises the millionaire salaries of executives and further grows the capital to which the company can now claim legal rights. In other words, as socialists often argue, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. However, when considering the ethics of capitalist consumption, the analysis cannot stop there.

It is not so much ethical consumption but rather ethical purity which is impossible under capitalism. Moreover, beneath such a threshold of ethical purity, there lie two spectra upon which one’s capitalist consumption can and should still be measured: that of ethics and, more importantly, that of the consumer. 

The spectrum of ethics — henceforth referred to as the ethical spectrum — is that which the deliberately advertised “social and environmental values of consumer products” implies. In other words, a hierarchy of ethics in consumption does exist just shy of ethical purity. And, most pressingly, that hierarchy is primarily highlighted by the aspects of a good or service’s production and distribution that can be observed, analyzed, and understood. Of course, such aspects are most often only made publicly available for observation, analysis, and understanding at the behest of their corporate manufacturers but they are empirical points of ethical reference nonetheless. Take the purchase of a shirt, for example. When a consumer purchases a shirt, the ethical spectrum offers a host of consumptive options based on the available social and environmental factors at hand, ones which, for the sake of argument, will be boiled down here into three outstanding choices.

The first choice, which will be the optimal form of ethical consumption in this scenario, is one in which it is known to the consumer that the shirt is both the product of union labor and produced in an environmentally conscious way, be that through the use of reusable materials, renewable energy, waste minimization, etc. The second choice, which will be the middle-of-the-road, intermediate form of ethical consumption in this scenario, is one in which the shirt is still the product of union labor but environmental considerations are not present, meaning labor exploitation is minimized through the presence of unionized production but the sustainable nature of the product is lacking. The third and final choice, which will be the worst and least preferable form of ethical consumption in this scenario, is one in which the production of the shirt lacks both union labor and environmental considerations, making it an ethically lackluster product regarding its accommodations for both labor exploitation and sustainability. It is in determining which of the three choices one should pursue, if any at all, that the second spectrum — that of the consumer — becomes relevant.

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The spectrum of the consumer — henceforth referred to as the consumer spectrum — is one which makes an even deeper distinction between consumptive practices than that of the ethical spectrum, as it precedes the question of ethics with the question of ability. To consider consumption under capitalism as an exercise of solely ethical dimensions is to neglect the vital reality underlying such a society: inequality is rampant, poverty is ever-worsening, and the material conditions of the masses only become more dire by the day. As such, it is often the case that for many consumers, ethical considerations are an aspect of capitalist consumption in which they simply do not have the socioeconomic capacity to engage. After all, who is to blame a working-class family for neglecting the exploitative or unsustainable aspects of a good or service they’ve consumed when their socioeconomic conditions may not even allow them to ensure their most basic needs?

The consumer spectrum acknowledges this disparity and ensures that the degree of ethical consideration a consumer engages in is proportional to their socioeconomic standing, one best represented by the consumer’s income. However, conditions beyond those of financial earnings can determine whether disposable income in particular will fluctuate over time, a trend that would then require the consumer’s ethical considerations to similarly shift. These outstanding conditions can take on many forms, incorporating factors such as working conditions — a greater likelihood of on-the-job injuries could decrease disposable income prospects due to evermore frequent medical bills — immigration status — undocumented workers have less access to social safety nets and unemployment benefits than their documented counterparts — and living conditions — crumbling infrastructure could gradually increase the financial burden of maintenance faced by tenants, decreasing their disposable income over time. As such, the consumer spectrum adjusts the ethical considerations incumbent upon a consumer based both on their income and on the potential for their disposable income to fluctuate. In turn, the consumer spectrum ensures two important outcomes.

On the one hand, it makes sure that socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals are not burdened with the task of considering ethics when making consumptive decisions to survive. On the other, it holds socioeconomically advantaged individuals to a higher standard of ethical consumption, one in which they would be remiss to not undergo the kind of ethical considerations previously outlined in the shirt exercise. Admittedly, the former assurance has become more widely accepted in discourse regarding working-class consumption. The latter, on the other hand, risks not achieving the same, as the maxim that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism can serve as low-hanging fruit for socioeconomically advantaged individuals to conveniently justify knowingly unethical consumption. The consumer spectrum seeks to account for such co-optation and counter it head-on.

This layout of consumptive spectra can be useful on the individual level of consumption. For those with the appropriate socioeconomic bandwidth, it offers bountiful considerations that can inform the consumption of a given good or service. However, the utility of the model is perhaps best understood on the macro level. Beyond the pressure that socialists must continue to exert on the existing system — uprooting the power of capital owners and corporations in the process — these spectra provide greater nuance to the socialist perspective on individual accountability and action. Through the ethics and consumer spectra, we can better envision the untapped potential of individualized proactivity in creating a less exploitative and more sustainable society, while also accommodating the diversity of lived experiences and forms of exploitation endured under the current economic system.

Thus, the notion of ethical consumption under capitalism should not simply culminate in an indisputable law of impossibility. Rather, it should be understood as a range of activity that can be engaged in — just shy of ethical purity — based on the ethical considerations at hand and, more pressingly, those which directly pertain to the socioeconomic capacities of the consumer. Only in considering this reality can we better understand the role of individual consumption in the broader socialist project of radical change and revolutionary transformation.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian Marxist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

The Secret, Anti-Socialist History Of Supermarkets

[Photo by hxyume via Getty Images]

By Ann Larson

Republished from Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

I was managing the front end of a grocery store one night during the height of the pandemic when a man with a bulge under his long black coat strolled through an empty checkout lane. One of the dozens of unhoused people who lived in encampments blocks from the store, the man walked past me with such confidence that I wondered if he really didn’t know what was about to happen.

The radio buzzed in my ear. “Let me know when that guy gets to the front,” said a security guard, “I’ll call John.” Another employee had seen the man slip something into his coat, and security was already watching him. “He’s headed to the exit,” I replied.

John appeared and cut the thief off at the door while another employee, built like a linebacker, approached from behind. The shoplifter tried to run, but John grabbed him and shoved him hard against the dry ice cooler. Groceries dropped to the floor. The man screamed and tried to break free, shouting, “Get away from me!”

John wrestled the shoplifter down, smashing his face sideways against the concrete. The other employee tried to tie the writhing man’s hands with a zip tie. John shoved a taser into the thief’s back, and tased him until he stopped moving. They dragged him away.

A bagger gathered the groceries scattered on the floor. “Donuts and milk,” he said, as he tossed the products on a checkstand. The donut box was crushed, and the milk carton was leaking. The store couldn’t sell those items now.

Minutes later, John radioed to report that the cops were on their way. As we had done numerous times before, my colleagues and I watched as a thief was escorted out of the store in handcuffs.

Stores Under Siege?

I began working at the store a few months before the tasing incident and just as the media had begun to report on a spike in retail crime. Stories about stores under siege were common last summer and fall. The more sensational entries described empty shelves and “third world” conditions at outlets targeted by thieves. The media’s focus both reflected and stoked broader fears about public safety. A national survey showed that almost three-quarters of Americans listed crime as a top concern.

I was skeptical about the reports. Evidence cast doubt on the claim that shoplifting was on the rise. Property crime had fallen during the pandemic, and data from the National Retail Federation showed only a slight increase in stores’ product loss during the same period. Some argued that the real issue was the increased visibility of theft thanks to smartphones.

I also suspected that the media’s focus on retail crime was part of a conservative backlash against criminal justice reforms. In the Atlantic, Amanda Mull suggested that the “great shoplifting freakout” was an attack on progressive states and cities that had reduced penalties for some offenses. Others accused the media of pushing pro-police propaganda during a time when theft was actually on the decline. The political motivations of anti-reformers were especially clear in California, where District Attorney Chesa Boudin would lose his job due to a recall campaign funded by billionaires and real estate interests in a city one media outlet called a “shoplifter’s paradise.”

There was no doubt plenty of truth to the progressive position that the retail crime wave was mostly media hype. But as I continued in my new job, my views grew somewhat more complicated. There really were a lot of shoplifting incidents at the store where I worked. I had no idea if they were more common than before the pandemic, but I knew that they were disturbing for workers and disastrous for shoplifters, who were sometimes met with violence and often with criminal penalties. Regardless of whether the spike in incidents was real or imagined, I began to see shoplifting as a genuine problem — not because of the stolen merchandise, but because it often kicks off an escalating chain of events that are damaging for everyone involved.

Guilt at my role in the tasing incident pushed me to ask a basic question: What historical conditions had put me and others in that situation? The answer revealed that what we think about shoplifting is the product of propaganda — a much deeper and more foundational story than the one being called out by some progressives. The way our society distributes basic goods is not natural or inevitable: the order was painstakingly constructed by powerful interests. Shoplifting is only the most obvious surface manifestation of the social crisis this arrangement has caused.

Supermarkets Versus Socialism

It wasn’t easy to steal groceries before the early twentieth century. Shoppers patronized independent, “full-service” stores where products were stocked behind a counter so that only a clerk could access them. Knowledgeable about the merchandise they sold, grocers enjoyed a kind of professional status, and customers relied on them for advice. Since prices were not posted, clerks also determined how much each customer paid. Bargaining was common.

Everything changed thanks to a grocery entrepreneur named Clarence Saunders. One day, the story goes, the former Confederate soldier was looking out the window of a train when he saw some pigs dashing to a trough. According to writer Benjamin Lorr, Saunders imagined the pigs as shoppers forced to pass through a gate to peruse “heavily branded pre-packaged goods . . . that didn’t need a clerk to recommend them.” Choosing from a display of fixed-price products was a radical idea. No one had ever before been able to wander the aisles of a store full of food.

Saunders opened the first self-service grocery outlet in 1916 in Memphis and named it Piggly Wiggly, apparently in reference to those farm animals that had inspired him. Because merchandise was ordered from wholesalers, prices were lower than at independent stores. The new arrangement also lowered costs by de-skilling labor: since clerks’ new primary job was stocking shelves, they gave up their status as industry professionals. Customers were thrilled at the prospect of doing for themselves what was formerly done by paid employees. Piggly Wiggly was a phenomenon.

Self-service made retail shoplifting as we know it today possible. In recognition of the risk, Saunders built his first store with turnstiles, separate entrances and exits, and steel fencing. The design, Lorr writes, “evok[ed] a prison yard” more than a food outlet. For shoppers, being penned in like farm animals or like human criminals was a small price to pay for the freedom to handle, assess, and select their food.

The interior of the original Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, Tennessee, 1918. Photo by Clifford H. Poland / Library of Congress

The rise of modern grocery shopping tracked with a broader economic shift, in which access to basic goods from health care and housing to food was mediated by large financial institutions. Wall Street money poured into the grocery industry, enabling Saunders to open more than twenty-five hundred Piggly Wigglies by the end of the 1930s. The Kroger corporation operated more than five thousand stores during the period. A&P, the Walmart of its day, dominated them all, with over fifteen thousand outlets in operation by the end of the decade.

The meteoric rise of grocery chains was not welcomed by everyone. As big retail chains stamped out independent grocers, critics complained that the stores destroyed the charm of small-town life and lowered wages. These days, with that battle decisively ended and the world remade by the victors, it’s difficult to imagine how fiercely the public debated the question of mass food distribution. In the 1930s, big retailers’ triumph was not a foregone conclusion: in response to anti-chain protests, twenty-six states imposed higher taxes on the biggest outlets.

Following the corporate takeover of the grocery business, and more broadly large capitalists’ role in the stock market crash and Great Depression, working-class people began to seek out more democratic forms of consumption. Enter the consumer cooperative, where members shared the labor of running stores and invested the profits back into their communities. By 1944, more than 1.5 million people had joined a cooperative, an increase of 800 percent from a few years before. Already constrained by state legislatures, retailers were suddenly also at war with progressive consumer-activists.

Black people were instrumental in developing a thriving cooperative movement. Barred from many stores due to Jim Crow laws in the South and racial discrimination in the North, blacks saw economic cooperation as a means of survival. It was a way to build on what the scholar Jessica Gordon Nembhard has called “a broad tradition of populism and economic justice,” and what W. E. B. Du Bois called the “spirit of revolt” that had begun during slavery.

One of the most successful cooperatives of the era was established in a Chicago housing project and named after the journalist and civil rights activist Ida B. Wells. The connection between Wells and the food distribution question was far from tenuous: Wells’s legendary career had begun in the 1890s with her investigation of the lynching of three men in Memphis — the same city where Saunders would later open the first Piggly Wiggly — after they opened the “People’s Grocery,” a cooperative that threatened a white grocer’s monopoly on the business.

Another black-led cooperative, the Young Negroes Cooperative League, was helmed by Ella Baker who would go on to lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr. “The soil and all of its resources,” she said in a 1935 interview, “will be reclaimed by its rightful owners — the working masses of the world.” For the civil rights activist, economic cooperation among working people was a key to establishing socialism.

This militant and ambitious rhetoric explains why the cooperative consumer movement became a target of the anti-communist Red Scare starting in the late 1930s and lasting until the 1960s. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) leveled the sensational charge that nearly all consumer groups in the United States were led by communists. HUAC accused co-ops and consumer activists of attempting to “discredit free enterprise in the United States,” a charge that made newspaper headlines around the country.

The scholar Landon Storrs has argued that cooperative organizations were targeted with the same vitriol as the “labor, anti-fascist, and civil rights causes” that also came under attack during the era. The result was devastating to a movement committed to black liberation and economic cooperation. Amid the Red Scare, shoppers began to distance themselves from cooperative stores maligned as un-American.

As co-ops were being denounced as a Soviet plot, self-service retail outlets were being heralded as symbols of economic freedom. The State Department opened model stores in Europe in the 1950s to convince the continent’s consumers that capitalism filled bellies best. The scholar Tracey Deutsch described one international tour where shoppers in Southern and Eastern Europe “were treated to exhibits of . . . checkout lanes, refrigerated cases for produce and frozen foods, and . . . gravity defying towers of canned goods.” Customers flocked to the stores. “Heaven must be like this,” one shopper said in response to the abundance on display.

Sensing a propaganda coup, business leaders like Nelson Rockefeller began opening grocery stores across the Atlantic with little hope of turning an immediate profit. “The perceived power of supermarkets to sway people from communism,” Deutsch explained, “informed the construction of actual supermarkets by U.S. firms in Europe.” Grocery stores had become anti-communist icons, an ideological victory more important to companies than profits.

Today, co-ops are often dismissed as offbeat boutiques frequented by hippies and the upper classes, while the vast majority of us shop in supermarkets.

The Triumph of Big Retail

The federally funded offensive to elevate retail chains as bastions of free-market capitalism while crushing democratic alternatives is the historical backdrop to today’s “great shoplifting freakout.”

Whether or not media reports of a crime surge are accurate, retail theft occurs frequently in our society — and the material basis for shoplifting has worsened over the last few years. A corporate food system that profits from “just-in-time” delivery led to empty shelves and panic buying during the pandemic and, more recently, to record-high inflation. Groceries are getting much harder for the average working-class American to afford. Yet even as the cost of groceries has skyrocketed, the concept of a privatized food distribution system is so hegemonic that other forms of mass provisioning are hard to imagine.

I began researching the grocery industry in part to absolve myself of guilt for having assisted in the capture of the donut thief. A better understanding of systemic causes, however, did not make me feel less implicated in the encounters between shoplifters and store employees that I observed on the job. I looked forward to the day when I would no longer have to feel like I was guarding the border between basic goods and the people who couldn’t afford them. But by the time I left the store, I knew that being on the other side of the checkstand offered no redemption.

Security personnel like John are hired to protect property. They also uphold the widely supported moral belief that people should not be able to steal and that stores should be pleasant places free of the social tensions that shoplifters bring. Like the prison guards featured in Eyal Press’s Dirty Work, grocery store guards are “necessary to the prevailing social order.” They solve “various ‘problems’ that many Americans want taken care of but don’t want to have to think too much about, much less handle themselves.” Once I transitioned from employee to customer, thieves would be tased and arrested on my behalf.

The propaganda campaign that helped to consolidate the commercial grocery industry has continued to the point where there is little public outcry about the fact that a handful of megacorporations now controls almost 80 percent of the market. One reason Big Retail has triumphed for so long is because stores are often community pillars that offer small pleasures in addition to basic goods. It’s hard to see them as the inherently exploitative, exclusionary, and violent places that they are — especially if the security guard isn’t coming after you.

Another reason for the industry’s durability is that, in the grocery store, Clarence Saunders’s original sleight of hand still works its magic. Aisles of products are out in the open, apparently available to anyone who wants them. Shoplifting disturbs and distresses because it reveals our broader social predicament: we are free to shop for what we need to live within the confines of a surveilled space. But we must pay the posted price to get out.

Ann Larson is a writer whose work has appeared in the New Republic, the Nation, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among other publications. She lives in Utah.

Retail Work and Customer Relations: An Interview

By Devon Bowers

This is the transcript of an email interview I did with former UK retail worker Helen Howard in which we discuss retail work, relations between customers and workers, and where the US retail industry is headed.

How did you wind up working in retail?

I started at the age of 16 in 1997, and by the next year I needed a weekend position to help me out financially. I was given four hours on a Sunday afternoon working in the music/video section of the store my brother worked at, with the opportunity to work extra hours during the week to fit in around my studies. Once I left college in 2001 I decided to stay on as I didn't know what I wanted to do for a career. I worked for the one company in various branches for 16 years, then left to enter education in 2013.

You stated in our discussion that you went all the way from a regular worker to an asst manager. In what ways did you see the personality differences and attitudes towards workers change as you moved up the ladder? Did you internalize some of these attitudes?

As members of my family had worked in the same store, I was pretty well known anyway and it was always assumed I would have most of the answers to questions. The store I was working at was unlike most other high street stores, giving all members of the store team the authority to solve most issues without having to call a supervisor. As I grew in confidence I dealt with most things myself and soon noticed that my weekend colleagues would turn to me to help them out. I discovered I was good at solving problems and when I was given a new member of staff to train up, I was able to help her settle in and eventually empower her to make her own decisions over refunds etc. I was given the promotion to supervisor in another store when I left college.

I soon gained a reputation as a 'fix-it' person, and was sent by the area managers to other stores that needed support in getting back on track with tasks. I only met with negativity in one particular store, but the whole attitude of the store team was not as it should be, and although I got a few people onside it was not a big success, and I left soon after. I didn't take these attitudes on board, as I knew the problems in that store ran deeper than I could fix.

When the internet first came into existence, how did that affect workers and what was the industry concerned about, if they were concerned at all?

We first noticed that people were starting to question why something was cheaper online than in stores, not something we were prepared for. When people then said, "Oh well I may as well get it online then," we knew we had a problem.

This grew when the cuts to overtime came in. Then we noticed that we were increasingly left with fewer and fewer colleagues around, and that people who had left were not getting replaced. When the large, two-floor store I used to work at was reduced to one floor in the early 2000s: that was when the alarm bells started ringing.

The company saw takings fall and knew it had to increase footfall into their stores and away from the internet so there was a huge increase in promotional activity in the store. Confectionery and stationery companies now do deals with the company to push their merchandise. This was by far and away the biggest change. Bigger signage, more cardboard display stands, more hanging signage, more pre-orders on books and videos were introduced. The pressure increased on workers to offer exemplary customer service, give out vouchers, keep displays filled and push certain confectionery lines at the tills. Stores in the 1990s were clear, tidy and quite open plan. By the 2000s, they were filled with colour, huge signs and displays everywhere to the point where they now look cluttered and visually 'noisy.'

You did a study in which you examined interactions between retail workers and customers. What were your findings and how do they relate to the alienation people experience in the workplace and larger society?

I had long been fascinated by the reactions some customers would have when told they couldn't have a refund, even though I remained calm and explained the store policy very clearly. This led to me deciding to explore this when I went back to university to study a degree in Psychology. I interviewed both customers and my colleagues at the store I was working inat the time. I compared their responses, and discovered something rather interesting. I saw that both the customers and sales assistants had a 'them and us' mentality. The customers saw the assistants not as individuals, but as faceless representatives of the company, and the assistants saw each customer as just one of many people they would serve that day. Significantly, both sides saw themselves as unique individuals. When this view was challenged by the other side, that's when the high negative emotions began to emerge.

Additionally, it should also be understood that human beings have a strong need to belong and to feel safe in a collective. Customers would band together and support each other against the assistant in a refund dispute, and so would the assistants. This effect would heighten the more serious the dispute. (I would theorise that if something extraordinary happened such as armed gunmen coming in to the store, the customers and assistants would then band together against the gunmen as it would make them feel safer.) This all relates to social identity theory, which aims to explain how people behave and feel in society. Tajfel (1979) proposed that the groups (e.g. social class, family, football team etc.) which people belonged to were an important source of pride and self-esteem.

Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world. So customers would see fellow customers as their 'in-group,' and the assistants as the 'out-group.'I understood from my study that the best customer service was when a customer was made to feel their uniqueness and individuality, particularly when an assistant would make an extra effort to solve an issue or query. An assistant would always remember and appreciate a customer who would smile and be pleasant to them, perhaps offering a compliment or something. On each occasion, the customer or the assistant would have their sense of individuality recognised and appreciated, rather than just be treated as 'one of the out-group.'

As a supervisor in a large store (as I was in around 2004), I was effectively Assistant Manager although the official title was almost obsolete by then. I knew that team morale was lead by the store manager and myself. I could sense that when there was conflict between us, the store team was unsettled and uneasy. When we were having a laugh and the store was doing well, the team was happy and worked very well together. If any member of my team felt unhappy or alienated, I would do my very best to talk to them and identify what the problem was. It was essential to make every person feel they were valued, respected and that I was grateful for every contribution they made.

Retail work many times is manual labor. Why do you think society looks down on retail as not a so called real job, but simultaneously admires manual laborers?

Twenty to thirty years ago, a career in retail was admirable and respectable. Nowadays this is not the case.

I would say that the main reason that retail is looked down on by most in other professions, is because there are no real qualifications needed to start, and many store managers have risen up the ranks by experience alone. (We do have some qualifications in the UK to assist in a career in retail, such as a BTEC or NVQ in Business Management, but these are not necessary.) The skills needed in retail (common sense, practical thinking, solution-focused problem-solving, numeracy and literacy, stress and time management amongst many) are not taught in a course but developed over time and mostly learned on the job.

Even though not everyone can develop these skills, they are still not valued as much and are therefore not as well paid. Most people in other professions would have taken a Saturday job in order to bring in a bit of pocket money, so it would be seen as a stop-gap job and not taken seriously.

People admire manual labourers such as builders, plumbers, electricians etc, because there are necessary courses to take to learn how to perform these jobs and a lot of money can be made. To most people, fixing a car or their central heating system is completely beyond them and therefore those that can, are respected and admired.

In the US currently, many retail stores are shutting down due to folks shopping online. Is there a same affect in the UK?

Yes, absolutely. We have lost many beloved high street stores over the past twenty years, particularly record and electronic shops and have also seen many companies buy each other out. However the various pound shop chains are alive and thriving.

For those that remain, store staff has been reduced to a skeleton and pressure exists to cut even more. Branches have been closed down with staff either made redundant or forced to relocate. Self-service checkouts have been introduced to attempt to cut queues. As a side-note, this further exacerbates the feeling of 'de-individualisation' of customers by the company, as they are not even served by a real person!

I think in the future, the convenience of shopping online will slowly bring back the desire to be treated as a human being and people will return to shopping in actual stores. People have never liked using automated systems such as telephone banking or choosing options on a phone keypad and really appreciate more than ever a personal service.