Seduction Robert Peston Goes Shopping

For the last 60 years, British retailers have led the world

and changed the way we live.

From family-run empires...

Everybody was a bit scared of him from the manager down.

He didn't suffer fools gladly, that's for sure.

..to pioneering supermarkets.

The week after Club Card was launched,

I knew my life had changed, I knew that the whole industry structure

would never be the same again.

From fashion boutiques...

It was amazing. Outside there were queues and queues and queues.

We used to have to shut the doors sometimes.

..to fast fashion moguls.

She said to me, "Why don't we do some business?"

I said, "Come and see me."

It was a good time for us, a good time for her.

It worked well for both of us.

And online converts.

You have to understand what e-commerce means.

You have to understand what m-commerce means.

You have to understand what s-commerce means.

And you put all those things into place, you can make money.

Retail is something we're good at.

It employs one in nine of us.

And, among Europe's largest countries,

we've consistently been the biggest shoppers and consumers.

We really are a nation of shopkeepers and shoppers.

This is the story of Britain's love affair with shopping.

How retailing has changed beyond recognition

since the Second World War and how it's changed us.

How retailing helped to make and then break Britain's economy.

And why retail is now in crisis,

coming to terms with how little spending money we've got

and the industry-shaking challenge of the internet.

We begin with how we fell in love with shopping.

# Shopping, shopping, shopping

# When mummy takes me shopping. #

This is how shopping used to be.

Women - and it was usually a woman's job to shop -

walked to the local high street and bought what they needed.

Shops in the 1950s,

you had to go to different stores for different things.

If you wanted vegetables, you'd go to the greengrocer's.

One was a newsagent and sweets.

But also clothes and the cobblers.

And then next door to that was the bakers'

with the cream cakes in the window.

# Shopping, shopping, shopping. #

In my Dad's shop, customers used to come every day

because they wanted fresh food, because there was no fridges

and they knew that it would be fresh in every day.

Two pounds of sugar.

A pound of margarine.

And I think I'll take a pound of cooking fat, I'm a bit short.

Mostly when you did your food shopping you went to the same

store every week, so they got to know you and you got to know them.

It was very friendly.

Customers were served across a counter,

with little opportunity to handle the goods before buying.

On the right hand side, it was usually an elderly gentleman who

served you with a big apron on,

and you could buy so many rashers of bacon

or you could buy butter

and they used to cut it off like you would cut cheese.

Gradually over a period of time you would develop the ability to

cut and weigh to the exact sizes and dimensions that people wanted

and they always used to stand there with their mouth open

and look at you and say, "How did you manage to do that?"

And then they would move you round to the dry side

where the ladies served you.

And they'd got rows of tins behind them,

various fruits and all that sort of thing.

And then they would add it all up and then you would pay.

You could be in the shop well over an hour, if not more,

and when you'd been at work all day it just added to everything.

Most shops were owned by a local shopkeeper.

The minority were chain stores with more than one branch.

Not that there was much to buy.

The economy had been reconstructed for the priority of winning the war

and it would be years before it was remade again

for the needs of the peace.

This was a time of caution, of austerity, of rationing.

It wouldn't be till 1954 that food rationing was abolished.

Shopping was drab.

Things were made even drabber

by the absence of proper competition on the high street.

Over half of all prices were fixed.

Since the 1890s,

manufacturers had set the prices at which their goods could be sold.

And price fixing became more pervasive

with the rise of mass-produced branded goods.

A lot of the prices were printed on the packaging

by the manufacturer and therefore it was dictated

and every shop would sell them at the same price.

This was called Resale Price Maintenance or RPM,

and it meant that a packet of Bird's Custard or a bar of Cadbury's

chocolate was the same price wherever you bought it.

Now it was good for the manufacturer and for the retailer because it

protected them from competition and it helped to guarantee their income.

But for the shopper it was bad news because it kept prices high.

Resale Price Maintenance put a strangling corset around shops.

If you've got a product which everybody's got

and no-one can sell it cheaper, where is the skill of re-selling?

I was selling a cine-camera from a company, a large importer,

and I thought I would offer a free library of films

if he buys the camera from Dixons.

And immediately the supplier cut off my supplies

because I was discounting indirectly his retail price.

Well, I thought that was absurd.

But rebellion was in the air.

And it was coming from an unexpected quarter.

-LADY ISOBEL BARNETT:

-It's more than just an ordinary success story.

It's a picture of a very real and great social change.

Because what Marks and Spencer's have done over the years

is to make it possible for everybody to be really well-dressed.

Marks and Spencer was causing an earthquake on the high street.

Its chairman, Simon Marks, was a retailing genius.

Simon Marks used to boast, "I am the greatest rebel of them all!"

And he was right.

He was determined to get round the constraints of RPM so he hired

his own dedicated manufacturers who made M&S branded goods for him.

In this way he could charge what he liked.

He was able to offer customers better quality goods

at keener prices.

This represented a huge industrial change.

Power was transferred from the makers, the manufacturers,

to the retailers.

The introduction of the St Michael brand was, quite simply,

a retail revolution.

# It's wool, it's St Michael

# It's wool, it's St Michael

# It's wool, it's St Michael, Marks and Spencer. #

M&S was the first large British retailer to introduce its own brand.

It was named after Simon's father, Michael,

who had started the business back in 1884.

Michael Marks was a penniless Jewish pedlar,

newly-arrived from Russian Poland.

Many of the great retailers of the 20th century

were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

They came from the same sort of places as my family.

They were interlopers

with very little vested interest in the status quo.

They were hard-working, tenacious, quick-thinking,

and created extraordinary, dynastic businesses.

Without them,

British retailing simply wouldn't have been the success it was.

Michael Marks started out with a market stall selling haberdashery,

buttons, needles, and stockings under the slogan,

"Don't ask the price. It's a penny."

He then went into business with a clerk called Tom Spencer.

Spencer provided the capital

that enabled Marks to open his first shops.

Tom Spencer helped Michael Marks build up the business,

but he retired after seven years.

It was really Michael's son, Simon,

who created the Marks and Spencer we know today.

He formed an extraordinary partnership

with his childhood friend, Israel Sieff.

Together they turned Marks and Spencer into a national institution.

In the process, they became immensely wealthy.

They even became peers of the realm.

Arguably, Marks and Spencer should more properly be called

Marks and Sieff.

Simon Marks ran M&S for a startling 48 years.

He was an autocrat who ruled with an iron will.

'He was a brilliant man.'

Difficult, tough, demanding,

a perfectionist.

And...you could be intimidated by him.

Did you feel scared of him?

I think everybody was a bit scared of him from the manager down.

He didn't suffer fools gladly, that's for sure.

He could give you a hard time

if you failed to meet the standards that he set.

Simon Marks' portrait hung in every store.

Rules were strict.

We clocked in. We came down the stairs.

The manageress was at the door,

and she examined every one of us

before we were allowed to go on the counters.

Your hair had to be tidy.

Your buttons done right up to your neck in your overall,

and everything had to be perfect.

If you wasn't perfect

you were sent back to the cloakroom to start again.

Marks had already transformed retail

with the introduction of the St Michael brand.

But he was determined to be even more radical,

with his emphasis on the customer.

Marks coined the phrase,

"The customer is always and completely right."

The customer was our priority.

If something went wrong we would change it immediately. No quibble.

Straightaway we'd change them.

Treating customers with integrity.

Don't cheat on them in any way.

What we said is if you come in here

you're going to buy a lovely wool skirt, beautifully made,

and it's going to cost you half of what it'd cost you anywhere else.

The clothes were better made.

If you bought a dress or a skirt, the hemlines were hand-sewn

so they hung better and they looked better on you.

I've got clothes going back years which are still good and I still wear

and people say to me, "That looks good, June", and I say,

"Well, you won't get it now because I bought it so many years ago!"

To ensure that M&S clothes were of the highest quality,

Marks poured big sums of money into research departments.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-Strength, elasticity, colour content,

washability, amongst other things, are tested.

In the 1950s, Marks' textile research department

played a big role in the development of polyester and nylon,

those easy-to-care-for man-made materials that significantly reduced

the amount of work a woman had to do when washing and ironing.

'Stretchability! Stretchability!

'For Bri Nylon stretch, St Michael from Marks and Spencer.'

Marks also spent over £500,000 every year

on a large design department to keep abreast of fashion.

Parisian designers were hired as consultants.

They were very, very stylish, quite glamorous.

And we did at one time used to model our dresses.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-The girls who work at Marks and Spencer

know better than anyone the value of the goods they sell.

Here are eight of them. Do they serve you sometimes?

Barbara Baker was lifted from the shop floor of M&S in Bromley

to star in a TV advert.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-Now if you're in the Bromley store tomorrow,

then maybe you'll see Barbara Baker.

Off duty, here she chooses a slim dress,

in cotton satin with a rose print.

'We went up to the television company

'and we modelled all Marks and Spencer's clothes!'

And they gave us the clothes afterwards, as a treat,

so that was all very nice.

We had to have our hair done and our make-up done.

It was all very exciting.

M&S had brought something quite close to high fashion

to the high street.

More than any other retailer,

Simon Marks had made us fall in love with shopping.

He seduced us with an addictive cocktail of high quality,

low prices and customer service.

By the 1950s, Marks and Spencer was the nation's favourite store.

When Simon Marks, as Lord Marks, died in 1964, he'd increased sales

an astonishing 500 times and profits by an amazing 1,000 times!

Simon Marks had shown the high street how to do it.

The years of post-war austerity

and rationing were finally coming to an end by the mid-1950s.

The shops began to fill with goods that had long been unavailable.

There was full employment and rising wages.

The average weekly wage doubled between 1950 and 1959.

This was when we were told we'd never had it so good.

Rising living standards and the increased availability of goods

led to something of a consumer boom.

And what did a 1950s housewife want?

Electric powered, labour-saving devices.

Irons, vacuum cleaners, washing machines.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-And the team of English Electric's demonstrators

work in dealers' showrooms throughout the country.

In 1955, only 17.5% of households owned a washing machine.

Three years later, the proportion was almost twice that,

and by 1966, 60% of households had a washing machine.

Women were buying a new way of life.

Gone was the era when they had to spend a whole day

doing the family wash.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-Power wringing is effortless.

The rollers are started, stopped or reversed by one simple control.

'You cannot believe the difference it made.'

All you had to do with a washing machine was get your clothes out,

sort them into different colours, put them in, set the time, leave it.

You could go off and do something else. Absolutely wonderful.

Women had more free time for leisure

but also to go out and get a job,

giving them more money to buy things at the shops.

So retailers looked for new ways

to encourage shoppers to part with their precious cash.

Hire purchase was actually an old idea.

Known as the never-never, it had been around since Victorian times.

But it was in the 1950s that this type of credit really took off.

-Were you thinking of hire purchase or cash?

-Hire purchase.

-Hire purchase.

Did you have any idea of what deposit you really wanted to put down?

-Roughly £30.

-I see, you've got £30.

-£30 will be able to give you goods to the value of say £150.

-I see.

The customer paid in instalments and didn't properly own the purchase

until the full amount had been paid off.

The instalments will work out at 24 monthly payments of £5 11s 10d.

Interest was charged so, of course, the customer paid considerably more

than the original price of the goods.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-And so, Mr and Mrs Earnshaw will get £150 worth

of furniture for their 30.

For them, hire purchase is a new experience.

Hire purchase made a huge difference to people of my age because you were

able to go out and buy things you normally wouldn't have been able to.

Before that you had to rely on hand-outs from family or friends.

The British had traditionally frowned upon credit,

but hire purchase somehow made it acceptable.

In 1958, the second-ever edition of Which? magazine estimated that

a typical British family owed around £20 on hire purchase.

That's £400 in today's money.

This was the moment, gently at first, when the British began to get

hooked on credit to living beyond their means.

Over the coming years,

our reliance on credit to pay for things would grow and grow.

The expression quickly cropped up of, "Live now, pay later".

And if you couldn't afford it, don't worry about it, just go and get it.

And nothing had to be paid for until you got what you wanted.

One could only take the view that it was a bad move.

I suppose you'll be glad to be shot of HP in 12 months' time?

Well, not really, we still have the sitting room to furnish

and then we start HP all over again.

This spend, spend, spend, this consumerism,

was spurred by television.

In 1955, with the arrival of ITV,

adverts began to be lobbed into British homes.

# I'm going to clean my home the modern way

# And the modern way is bright and gay with the modern soap

# It's Puritan, hooray! #

Manufacturers' spending on lavish adverts like this soared.

Puritan, the modern home soap.

# Puritan, puritan, the modern home soap. #

TV advertising was an American invention.

Over there the consumer boom had arrived earlier and faster.

And America was about to export to us the greatest retail innovation

of the 20th century.

In 1949, Alan Sainsbury, managing director of the grocery chain,

went on a research trip to the States.

He went over to the United States

to investigate something which hadn't happened in Britain at all,

which was self-serving stores or supermarkets.

It didn't take long for him

to realise what an advantage this would bring.

Brimming with excitement, Alan Sainsbury set about developing

a British version of the supermarket.

Like Marks and Spencer, Sainsbury's had grown from small beginnings

to become a high street favourite.

John James Sainsbury had opened his first grocer's shop

on London's Drury Lane.

Sainsbury's started life as a corner shop on this spot in 1869.

It claimed to sell the best butter in the world.

Now, I can't scientifically verify that,

but, by all accounts, it did sell pretty high quality food

at low-ish prices in clean, hygienic conditions.

Like Marks and Spencer, it was a family affair, ruled autocratically.

And also like M&S,

it broke free of the fetters of RPM by selling its own brand.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-This is the freshest margarine you can buy.

It's Sainsbury's own JS Margarine, made only for Sainsbury's customers.

By 1950, Sainsbury's was a popular grocery chain

with 244 stores across the South and the Midlands.

Ask for JS Margarine next time you're in Sainsbury's.

You'll like it!

But it was Alan Sainsbury's enthusiasm for self-service

that would see the company's fortunes really take off.

He decided to try a bold experiment.

He tore out the traditional counters of one of his stores

and converted it to self-service.

The self-service store was born in one shop in 1950 in Croydon.

The address was 911, London Road, Croydon.

And when I came to this business, all one could hear was people

talking about 911 because it was a very great success.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-You're given a wire basket as you go in,

and that's to put the groceries in.

From then on, the customer's more or less on her own,

free to choose whatever she wants.

But not quite everyone liked this new way of shopping.

I remember a judge's wife in Purley swearing at me and saying,

I had no right to expect the customer to do the work

that the assistant had done in the past.

In another case, a customer threw a wire basket at me

because she thought it was all wrong.

However, most shoppers loved the new system.

Self-service was very, very good

because you didn't have to queue and wait

and you picked up what you wanted.

You went round at your own pace.

And it was so much quicker, it saved you time.

The only queue you had was at the checkout

when you went to pay for it.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-Because everything is on show and easy to reach,

housewives are finding shopping easier, quicker and more convenient.

It was a revolution.

It was wonderful to choose what you wanted and buy what you wanted.

New things. Cheaper price.

Everything about it was wonderful.

Like Marks and Spencer's emphasis on quality and value

and the introduction of hire purchase,

self-service encouraged us to spend more.

There were fears that shoppers liked this new way of shopping too much.

There was too much choice, too much temptation

and shoppers were buying far more than they needed.

One commentator talked about "The tantalising jungle of goods,

"and the screeching macaw voices calling out the claims

"of each of the desirable items."

I remember the first time we went, I said to Dad,

"Now be careful, you know, we're not spending a lot of money".

And we just went round, kept putting things in the trolley,

and then we got the checkout, I just looked at Dad and I looked

at the trolley and I said, "This is not going to be cheap, you know."

-I think you spend more than you need.

-Yes, I think so too.

You go to a supermarket, or these help yourself stores,

you go take your basket round on your arm,

you pick up this and the other, and by the time you get to pay the bill,

-it's much more than you thought it was.

-Yes, a bit of a shock.

Self-service also altered the relationship

between shopkeeper and shopper.

Gone was the cosy, personal rapport,

replaced by something a bit more arms-length.

This had the effect of undermining customer loyalty.

Shoppers no longer felt a compunction

to stick to a single shop.

In 1957, a half of shoppers said they stuck to a single grocer.

That had fallen to a quarter just three years later.

The big new thing was shopping around.

Large retailers soon realised the financial benefits of self-service.

'It led to a greater turnover per square foot.

'It was possible to do more trade in the same amount of space.'

All our managers and people who'd been in the business a long time

thought, "My goodness, things are going to change.

"We're going to find a new way of doing things."

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-More and more shops throughout Britain

are now planning to open on self-service lines.

In 1950, there were only ten self-service stores in Britain.

17 years later, there were 24,000.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-And housewives hope that it will cut out queues.

But if self-service was an icy blast to tradition,

Resale Price Maintenance was still preserving many of the old ways.

Manufacturers continued to set prices

at which most goods could be sold,

although more and more people thought that was unfair.

# That was the week that was. It's over, let it go. #

It's a monopolistic and restrictive practice. It hampers efficiency.

It protects inefficiency

and it stops innovations in shopkeeping and in shopping.

It hurts the housewife's pocket, the country's efficiency,

our economic system's freedom, and everybody's choice.

And I think it's high time we got rid of it.

The big chains like Tesco and Sainsbury's

lobbied for RPM to be scrapped.

Many small shopkeepers were appalled and scared.

Well, I'm thoroughly disgusted with it

because so many of my goods are price controlled

and I think in the long run it will kill the small shopkeeper.

Despite fears that it would lose them the votes of small shopkeepers,

Ted Heath led a Tory push to abolish RPM.

It was finally passed by one vote in 1964.

The abolition of RPM would have a transforming effect.

Small, independent chains and manufacturers

were no longer protected from competition.

They would be squeezed. Many would go out of business.

But for the big chains, able to buy in bulk and offer huge discounts,

this was the moment when they would really start to prosper.

In 1966, Asda became one of the first retailers

to take full advantage of the abolition of RPM.

It would cut prices on an unprecedented scale.

And it did so by introducing another new concept to Britain -

the superstore.

Asda was the brainchild of Peter Asquith,

a butcher from Pontefract who, with his brother Fred,

had opened a small supermarket in the late '50s.

It was there that the Asquith brothers had first caught

the discounting bug.

Crosse and Blackwell were running a promotion,

offering sixpence in exchange for a coupon cut from their cans.

The enterprising Asquiths ordered 24,000 cans, and painstakingly

cut out the coupons, sent them off and got £600 in return.

They then passed the refund on to their customers,

selling the cans for sixpence less than the marked up price.

"We never looked back from that moment on", the Asquiths said.

They wanted to create a large, aggressive, cut-price supermarket,

and they approached Noel Stockdale, Vice-Chairman of Associated Dairies.

Peter and father hit it off from day one,

and really that's how the business started.

Asda actually stands for the AS of Asquith and the DA of Dairies.

The Asquiths and Noel Stockdale went on the hunt for big premises

to house their new chain.

They found what they were looking for in Nottingham.

A vast, edge-of-town warehouse,

which had been opened in 1964 by an American company called Gem.

The Gem store was filled with a variety of concessions.

It was a collection of individual shops

rather than a modern supermarket.

And it had failed to take off.

When Noel Stockdale and Peter Asquith first came here

to the Gem store, there were more staff than customers.

Sales were a measly £6,000 a week.

"Do you think we can make a go of this?" Stockdale asked Asquith.

He said that he thought they could.

So Stockdale asked him,

"Well, how much do you think we can make in a week?"

Asquith replied, "Around £25,000."

Now he was almost right.

In its first week as Asda they were making £30,000.

And, within six months, sales had doubled.

Out went the concessions, in came a supermarket,

but on a scale never before seen in Britain.

I can remember Dad standing, looking,

his face absolutely amazed.

And he said, "I think we'll have a good time here, girl, you know."

It was amazing. We'd never seen anything like it.

Asda's greatest innovation was its cheap prices.

'The bigger the store, the bigger the volumes.

'The bigger the volumes, the cheaper the prices.'

We were up to 17% cheaper on food lines in the very early days.

We couldn't help but notice how different the prices were.

Things were so much cheaper.

And, unlike other stores of the time,

everything was available under one roof.

What Asda really did was progress the one-stop shopping concept

and it provided our customers with the opportunity

to buy most of their household needs at very competitive prices.

It really was part of a shopping revolution.

This concept of a one-stop shop appealed to women

who were going out to work in ever-larger numbers.

'It was very convenient to be able to buy everything in one place'

because it meant you could do your whole week, fortnight,

monthly shopping all in one go.

Obviously you needed your fridges and everything at home,

but gradually they were becoming more available,

and so you could buy anything and store it.

The daily shop was being replaced by the weekly shop.

Asda encouraged this with a 1,000-space car park

and a petrol station, catering for the rising numbers of car owners.

Asda had set the big future trend.

Supermarkets on the edge of town with plenty of parking,

offering all manner of goods at cheap prices.

The modern superstore had been born.

Not that everybody in Nottingham was happy about it.

When the Asda opened,

something like at least half a dozen shops in the vicinity closed down.

But it wasn't just in the vicinity,

because, with it having a large car park,

it had a far-reaching effect on the suburbs all the way around the city.

Despite fears for the traditional high street, more and more

edge-of-town supermarkets were opening and offering low prices.

They weren't the only shops keen to discount.

# Crash bang wallop, what a picture,

# What a picture, what a photograph... #

In the 1960s, the camera and electronics chain Dixons

found a new way to cut prices.

# What a picture, what a picture

# Rum-tiddly-um-pum, pum-pum-pum

# See it in your family album. #

It would help to set a trend

which would have a profound effect on British retail

and would contribute to one of the greatest changes

in the post-war British economy.

The decline of manufacturing.

Dixons started life in 1937 as a photographic studio.

It was founded by Charles Kalms,

another descendent of Jewish emigres from Eastern Europe.

'My Dad bought this small shop in Southend.'

Dixons, 32A High Street, Southend.

500 square feet, selling six postcards for nine pence

to day-trippers who came down for the day from Fenchurch Street.

Dixons didn't really take off until 1948, when Kalms's son,

Stanley, joined the business.

In his heyday, Stanley Kalms was one of retail's great innovators.

In the 1950s, just as photography was becoming an affordable,

popular hobby, he remade Dixons from a photographic studio

into a chain of camera shops.

In the 1970s, when colour TV, hi-fis and video recorders became the rage,

Dixons became all about them.

And in the 1980s,

Dixons became pioneers of what were then called home computers.

One of Stanley Kalms' greatest breakthroughs

was inspired by the strictures of RPM.

Frustrated by British manufacturers' enforcement of fixed prices,

he began to find his merchandise abroad.

'I was advised that the Far East was an El Dorado.'

I shipped myself out to Hong Kong, Japan, and made fantastic contacts.

I discovered something which was unbelievable.

I could buy direct from these countries at prices

which were a quarter or a third than I was paying in the UK.

So immediately I started to import low-cost products

and, all of a sudden, I was making margins which was astronomical

and still undercutting the market.

Kalms sold them under the German-sounding brand name Prinz.

Well, in those days, to be honest,

German-sounding products were fashionable, whereas Japanese

were still suffering from the idea that they copied.

By 1963, 60% of all Dixons' sales were own-label products.

The company's profits rocketed from nearly £7,000 in 1958

to £160,000 just four years later.

Stanley Kalms demonstrated that big profits could be made

by buying from abroad.

In subsequent years,

other retailers followed his example of buying cheaply overseas.

The result - British manufacturers were decimated.

-ARCHIVE VOICEOVER:

-Today there are more than one and a half million

square feet of empty factory space.

In the eight years from 1961 to 1968, the number of people working

in manufacturing industry dropped by 75%.

Socially, I thought it was terribly distressing.

The fact was that British manufacturers had no right to

be competing in an industry where they had no skills,

and couldn't compete on price.

Was there anything, looking back on it,

that our manufacturers could have done to save themselves?

No, I don't think so.

They moved into the industry post the war

because German goods were banned.

Imports from Germany were prohibited

so they started to copy and rip off German products.

For instance, the Rollefleix, which was a great German brand,

was copied by a company called the Microflex. Lovely camera.

But the moment imports were allowed from Germany,

it went bust the following day.

The fact was that you couldn't compete and a country should

only go into markets where it has a competitive edge.

In Germany, after the devastation of the Second World War, there was

a concerted and successful effort to develop manufacturing industry.

But in Britain, manufacturing was in slow, painful

and inexorable decline.

While retail was on the rise.

Retailers were transforming the experience of shopping.

There was more choice, more competition, more comfort

and the retailers were becoming more sophisticated,

identifying consumers' needs and taking steps to meet them.

In the 1960s and 1970s,

two new categories of consumer were apparently born, and our shops

changed in a fundamental way to take money off them.

Here's what you had in mind, sir, isn't it? 84 shillings.

But that's an awful price.

Let me show you some flannel and Worcester then, madam.

But I don't want flannel.

Traditionally, young people had dressed much like their parents

and had limited spending power.

I suppose you want something different from the school grey, sir?

You sound as if you're on his side.

His father hates these drainpipe trousers.

But in the late '50s, full employment and rising wages

had transformed young people into teenagers.

A distinct social group with the ready cash to assert their identity

through shopping!

By the '60s,

the average teenager was earning the equivalent of £150 a week.

70% of which was available to spend.

In 1960, the now defunct Sunday Graphic newspaper reported

with horror that a typical teenage lad, who earned £5 a week,

owned 25 ties, eight shirts,

five suits, five pairs of shoes,

two pairs of slacks, a jacket,

an overcoat and a pair of jeans.

This was conspicuous consumption of a sort that

horrified his parents' generation.

These new teenagers were perhaps the first proper consumers.

The first generation to define themselves by what they bought.

Coffee bars and record shops sprang up to cater for them.

Clothes shops weren't keeping up.

In Oxford Street, there were some, what I call Madame shops,

where you walked into the door

and there was a woman waiting to pounce on you.

'Will you show this lady some cardigans, please?

'Certainly. What colour would you like?

'Have you anything in powder blue?'

Down one side of the shop there were glass counters.

The assistants stood behind them.

The merchandise was in drawers behind them.

'No, I don't like any of those.'

But the '60s were beginning to swing

and London was becoming the world leader in young fashion.

Boutiques were opened, but they tended to be in the capital

and were pricey.

What was needed was a high street youth chain

and one finally arrived in 1965.

It was created by Bernard Lewis,

who came from another one of those Jewish immigrant families.

In the mid-60s, Bernard Lewis ran a traditional women's fashion chain

called Lewis Separates.

There was a different mood in the air

and it was time to innovate and do something different.

So we converted a shop to a Chelsea Girl.

London was the centre of the universe

and Chelsea was the centre of London and that's where it came from.

Chelsea Girl would transform the way fashion retailing was done.

It was a very exciting concept.

There was no other store like it or boutique like it.

It was a dark environment when you walked in.

All the walls were painted navy blue.

There was a funny felt carpet which I remember,

and then there was tubing, industrial tubing which they sprayed red,

and it was all kind of whirling around the shop

all up high in the ceiling and the clothes were hung on the tubing.

The clothes were displayed in a very accessible fashion.

They were all there for everybody to touch and feel

and look at and hold up against themselves and try on.

It was amazing, and very loud music.

Outside there were queues and queues and queues.

Which you just don't see now.

We used to have to shut the doors sometimes.

Anybody who was anybody, really,

came to see what was going on this shop.

It was almost a frenzy, because it was so accessible,

it was so affordable, and they so wanted it all the time.

MUSIC: "Children Of The Revolution" by T-Rex

For the first time,

teenage girls had a shop that was specifically for them.

It was completely different

from the shopping I had known with my mother,

because it was very sensual

and very kind of sexually charged.

It was really an awakening.

Shopping as a kind of leisure space,

you know, shopping as a membership,

shopping as a sense of community, a sense of belonging.

Retailers like Chelsea Girl hooked a generation on shopping.

And they'd grow up to become the career women of the '70s and '80s.

MUSIC: "She Works Hard For The Money" by Donna Summer

Women were, for the first time in their family history,

coming out with a university degree,

looking to enter into the marketplace, and wanted a uniform,

wanted a kind of corporate look, you know, warrior battle dress.

Retailer and fashion buyer George Davies

was the first to notice a big gap in the market.

'In those days...'

everybody crammed stores full of merchandise for youngsters,

you know, from 18 to 25, 26.

There was then the great Marks & Spencer,

who were very stable, middle-of-the-road, fine.

And then, if you wanted to get anything better or different,

as a 25, 30-year-old and above,

you had to go to Jaeger or Country Casuals

and they were really expensive.

In 1981, George Davies was employed by the menswear chain Hepworth

to create a new women's fashion chain.

He was given just six weeks to come up with a concept,

and he created Next.

I got a call one day from John Stevenson.

He said, "I've got the name."

"N-E-X-T".

I said, "Go on." He said, "That's it".

I said, "That's it?"

And then I said, "That's brilliant."

Because obviously it's immediate, it's future -

which is what fashion is.

When Next launched, it was incredibly exciting,

because it really felt like

here was a place where you're going to get all your needs met.

And here was a store that knew exactly what you wanted

before you knew it yourself.

Next's great innovation

was what George Davies called "the total look".

I divided the shop into four different colour palettes.

It gave the woman going in the choice

of knitwear, shirts, in different colours,

and so the woman felt she was making the choice,

rather than the days of M&S

it would have been, you know, white with black. I didn't do that.

So you picked out the suit,

then there the huge ear chandeliers to go with it

because jewellery was maximalist in those days.

You picked out the matching bag. There were the shoes.

It had all been thought out

in a way that that made shopping very efficient.

Also very easy to spend more money than you perhaps first intended.

It's something, you know, completely different.

The clothes are "with it",

and, really, the quality's good, but the prices are low

and that's, really, I think why it'll be a success.

# Cos we are living in a material world

# And I am a material girl... #

Next captured the mood of the times.

In Margaret Thatcher's Britain of the 1980s,

millions wanted to look successful, powerful, rich.

We had the idea that women were going to go all the way to the top.

We had a female prime minister.

And I think that Next kind of just got it right.

Next was for women managers and anyone who aspired to be a manager.

When George Davies was asked where should the company open new shops,

he said, "Anywhere there are Tory voters."

# Got brass

# In pocket... #

If Next solved the problem of what career women should wear,

Marks & Spencer answered the question of what they should eat.

With little free time to cook,

women wanted a quick, easy meal solution.

Just as the washing machine had freed women to go to work,

the ready meal would help them climb the career ladder.

But convenience food was in its infancy and far from appetising.

The most famous and probably the most ghastly

were boil-in-the-bag fish

and this would be a little portion, a little kind of saw-cut square

of white, greyish-white fish.

And once that had cooked and you opened the bag,

there would be a horrible little emission of steam

and the worst kind of school-food smell

would come out of the top of this

and it would sort of slip onto the plate.

Mmm. My compliments to the chef!

Marks & Spencer decided it was time to do something about it.

Marks & Spencer had been selling food since the 1930s,

but it was in the 1970s and 1980s

that it really changed our eating habits

with the invention of the modern ready meal.

It used fresh ingredients, chilled them,

and sold the dishes while still fresh.

Believe it or not, this represented something of a revolution.

MUSIC: "Chanson D'Amour" by The Manhattan Transfer

The dish that changed everything was chicken Kiev.

It arrived in 1979, when anxious M&S bosses

were reassured that the British public could cope with garlic.

They needn't have worried. The first weekend it went on sale,

£10,000 worth of chicken Kiev was sold.

All the stock ran out,

in spite of its premium price of £1.99, or £8 in today's money.

The chicken Kiev. We thought this was very sophisticated.

It was something that you might have seen in a bistro,

if you'd been to one of those places with a rose bottle on the table

with a candle in it.

It's mysterious, it's very exciting.

Italian, Chinese, and Indian dishes followed,

along with pre-washed and prepared vegetables, cut into batons.

Resistance was futile.

We became increasingly addicted

to the convenience, and even glamour, of the ready meal.

I think the ready meals say an awful lot about us.

I mean, they say a lot about our aspirations,

what we're interested in,

perhaps where we've been, even, you know,

what we're watching on TV.

They are a reflection, very much, of how we change,

you know, in society.

And in the mid-'80s, society was changing fast.

Under Margaret Thatcher, the banking and service industries,

including retail, roared ahead.

It was powered by loosening the shackles on the City of London.

Banks and building societies

were suddenly able to lend more or less as much as they liked -

credit rationing was over some 30 years

after the abolition of food and clothing rationing.

Credit cards - which hadn't existed before the early 1960s -

were chucked at a debt-thirsty nation.

In 1974, there were 6 million credit cards in issue.

Within 12 years that number had more or less quadrupled.

And all that plastic spurred a shopping binge.

MUSIC: "Temptation" by Heaven 17

Retail was such a success story that Thatcher, a grocer's daughter,

employed Marks & Spencer boss Derek Rayner to chair a think-tank

to improve efficiency and eliminate waste in government.

I'm an enormous fan of Marks & Spencer's.

This is a Marks & Spencer's coat and it's superb.

It was clear what Thatcher thought -

if you could run a shop, you could run a country.

At the same time, more and more British manufacturers

were shrinking, moving jobs overseas, or closing altogether.

Mrs Thatcher's government,

keen to regenerate Britain's dying industrial areas,

launched enterprise zones -

brownfield sites where generous tax breaks

were given to companies that were supposed to create new jobs.

It was hoped that light industry would move in.

But it didn't work out quite like that.

In 1986, on a coal-ash dump of a disused power station

just outside Gateshead,

Europe's biggest shopping centre was opened.

The Metrocentre was the brainchild of property developer Sir John Hall.

It's an American idea, American malls.

I travelled to the States a lot

when I was a younger property developer, looking for ideas,

and I saw the American malls and thought they would be great idea

for the inclement weather we had in the UK,

especially in the North East,

so I brought the idea back to England.

The Metrocentre was like nothing ever seen before in Britain -

a gleaming temple of shopping with three miles of shops...

..including Marks & Spencer's first-ever out-of-town store.

But the Metrocentre was about more than just conventional shopping.

There were restaurants...

a cinema...

a funfair...

even a re-creation of a '50s high street

for those who hankered after "the good old days".

This was shopping as lifestyle,

shopping as leisure for the whole family.

It was a retail revolution.

The North East was at the forefront of the industrial revolution

and I like to think that

we were at the forefront of the retail revolution.

We've got this. Magnificent.

Beautiful. It's really lovely, yes, I'm really impressed.

There's plenty of good shops about.

Just need plenty of money to spend now in them.

Even the Prime Minister came to worship in the temple.

Oh, I think it's lovely.

We've read about it, we've heard about it, we've seen the pictures,

but it exceeds everything one ever believed.

Under Mrs Thatcher, retail would grow, year after year,

as a proportion of the British economy.

Shopping was king.

Long gone were the days when shopping was drab and dreary.

By the late 1980s, shopping was a fun day out,

of aspiration, even glamour.

Over the course of 30 years, we'd been transformed

from a people who bought only the things we needed

to people who shopped for the sheer pleasure

of buying the things we don't need.

But shopping was to become a national addiction

and we were about to embark on the mother of all shopping sprees

that would leave us with one hell of a hangover

MUSIC: "Wannabe" by Spice Girls

Next time Britain goes shopping-bonkers:

Fuelled by easy credit, we binge on cheap goods,

most of them made abroad.

The result - huge debt and a broken economy.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd