Dundrum Town Centre — I went, I saw, I came home with a loyalty card. And three bags of shopping, a free make-up set, several sprays of expensive perfume and a warm feeling of being wanted. If shopping is the new religion then Dundrum, now on course to be Europe’s biggest retail experience, is Mecca and the Vatican under a single shimmering glass roof, complete with creche facilities and plenty of car-parking spaces.
In the same way that places of worship once offered a sense of communal wellbeing and wonder, an awareness of individual human value in a great, teeming, bewildering universe, giant shopping centres now fill that need. From the moment you drive into the bright underground car park in Dundrum, and a nice lady with an eastern European accent presses the button to give you your parking ticket and wishes you a nice day you feel, to paraphrase the prophet, that you are a child of the universal shopping experience as much as the trees and the stars.
And, like the ladies who can actually afford the €430 Anne Klein bags in House of Fraser, you feel you have a right to be there. You don’t have to buy anything. Strolling around the pale marble halls and taking the elevators up to the higher floors makes you feel part of a greater enterprise in which you are a small but treasured cog. Everywhere are reassurances of how much they love you — between customers the digital display on the tills in Boots proclaim that all its staff are happy to serve you, huge signs on many of the shops declare their fervent wish that you are enjoying shopping with them, and friendly security folk will help you find your car in a vast sea of identical family saloons, and then give a cheery wave as you drive off.
The Catholic church once ran its own loyalty club system — the more indulgences you notched up for non-obligatory observances, the fewer turns on the spit you got in purgatory — but unlike the House of Fraser it didn’t hand out platinum cards and promise all sorts of special offers and exclusive discounts as well. Retailing these days is no longer about selling you things, not even about selling you things you don’t need, it is about convincing you that you are a worthy person who is entitled to your share of the good things in life.
That probably helps explain why the American mall culture has become such a pronounced phenomenon around the country. These are not just places you go to pick up your weekly shop or a child’s birthday present or a new outfit for a special occasion. Youngsters spend their days hanging about in their cafes and fast food outlets, drinking coffees from paper cups, texting each other and strolling the aisles in packs. Families take day trips to shop and eat and watch movies and turn an otherwise aimless outing into something that feels purposeful because so many other people have had the very same idea and, well, they can’t all be wrong.
The amount of publicity that surrounded the opening of the Dundrum centre last week speaks volumes about the casual acceptance of the proposition that a day spent shopping is a wholesome and fulfilling family occasion. It is ironic that a trip to a shopping mall has taken over from a trip to church as a Sunday destination, considering that shopping and religion have something in common: they are both about making preparations for a life to come, sometime in the future, when you expect to be happy, content and surrounded by beauty.
Shopping is about living anywhere other than in the moment. It involves sourcing clothes and shoes for future events that might never happen, beauty products that might make you look better in a week’s or a month’s time or might not work at all, home furnishings for all the entertaining you might never do. A nation that shops so feverishly, and that accords so much importance to possessing one of the biggest shopping centres in Europe, is arguably one deeply dissatisfied with existing realities.
It will be interesting to see whether the arrival of this shopping palace will have a positive impact on our tourism numbers, or indeed feature prominently in promotional brochures selling Dublin as a chic location for a city break. Last week a survey by Tourism Ireland found, unsurprisingly, that British folk don’t rate Ireland as a place to visit for a stylish weekend of culture. And it is hard to see how we propose to lure our neighbours by offering the very same merchandise and shop fronts and brand names to be found in any British town.
So far, that approach isn’t showing signs of fooling anybody: a recent article in GQ magazine compared Dublin with Blackpool in terms of culture, sophistication and subtle social opportunities.
The one glimmer of hope, in the Tourism Ireland survey, was the finding that our British neighbours still view Dublin as a “people” city, bless their hearts. So, while they are likely to take some convincing that Dublin is a shoppers’ paradise, potential tourists remain willing to believe that they’ll be met with friendship and hospitality and easy good cheer when they step off their £25 Ryanair flight.
The survey showed an inconvenient awareness of the expense of an Irish holiday and of the very real likelihood of being ripped off at every possible opportunity while here. Yet, despite all those negative expectations, the impression that this country is a welcoming place has somehow survived. Much like the small local boutiques in Dundrum village right now, its chances of continued good health must be pretty slim.
I have no doubt that all the folk who wished me a happy day, enjoyable shopping and a speedy return to the new centre in Dundrum last Friday morning meant every word of it. Why wouldn’t they? Hundreds of millions of euros and 4,000 jobs are riding on the assumption that our appetite for high-street British shops and American-style skinny-lattes-to-go is strong and enduring.
Clearly the acquisition of one of Europe’s biggest shopping centres has eased some nagging national insecurity about our modernity, our sophistication, our true entitlement to consider ourselves a progressive First World country while we didn’t even have a Harvey Nicks in the capital. Now, at last, we can take our place among nations where you can buy Ikea furniture and Office footwear. The problem is that bland uniformity and four floors of Marks & Spencer is not what visitors come to Dublin to find. Nor, for that matter, is the Desperate Housewives’ experience necessarily the answer to our own rumbling discontent.
Despite what our neighbours may imagine, I suspect Dublin is no longer a “people” city and, if British tourists come here in search of a warm welcome and a friendly word, our best bet would be to direct them to the English High Street Theme Park in Dundrum. There, they will certainly be greeted, helped with their parcels and wished a nice day, most likely by cheery security staff with eastern European accents.
