This series of blog posts will focus on a snapshot of everyday life in Britain over the previous four decades (1980s-2010s) as recounted through Mass Observation Project material. This month’s blog is based on responses to the Summer 1995 ‘Shopping in Britain’ directive, and each blog post will focus on a topic of everyday life covered by MO, zooming in on respondents’ thoughts and opinions. These blogs will also highlight the creative and visual content within MOP’s collections, including photographs, drawings and newspaper clippings sent as part of responses, which are of key interest in blog author Neve Meats’ wider research with MOP data. Subsequent blogs in the series will focus on the following themes: ‘Animals and Humans’ (2009); ‘Your Bedroom’ (2017).
The Summer 1995 directive, like the Spring 1988 directive which was the focus of last month’s blog, invited MOP’s panellists to respond to questions a singular theme: shopping in Britain. The directive was commissioned by University of Sussex-based academics Janice Winship and Jenny Shaw, who, through MO, sent respondents a two-page document with questions prompting respondents to think about their shopping habits and experiences. The questions began with a broad scope, suggesting respondents ponder what made British shops and shopping distinct, consider the changing face of modern consumption and the social role of shopping. Questions then became more focussed, asking for accounts of specific shopping trips, comparisons of individual shops, details about who respondents shop with, and what they predict the future of shopping might look like. The final ‘imagine’ section features a couple of inclusions which are amusing to a reader in 2026: the hypotheticals of ‘how would you feel if the bulk of routine purchases were delivered to your home?’ and ‘how do you think your shopping habits would change if you were in the year 2020?’ for example. Any 2026 reader of this directive will no doubt find a smile creeping onto their face at the perceived novelty of purchases being delivered to your door, something which was essential in the 2020s with Covid, and remains a day-to-day concept in our lives now. The responses to this directive were varied, reflecting the variety in respondents’ individual shopping habits, and the focus of this blog series is on exploring the creative or visual elements within responses, so it is these types of responses which I shall now showcase.
Given the mundanity and familiarity of the topic, I had some expectations about what I might find within the archival boxes. I expected to see receipts and flyers, and these two items were indeed present in the first box I opened. A18 attached a Tesco receipt to their handwritten response, describing this to be representative of ‘a typical weekend shop’. When I first looked over it, I remarked how subtly different it is to today’s receipts, being narrower paper and having only one brand name listed on it. A receipt of mine from earlier this week was almost double the width and twice as long (despite having a similar number of items on it), the latter because every item had a brand indicator printed next to it. Reading A18’s response, he mentions a conscious change to buying supermarkets’ own-brand products rather than branded products, which may explain the lack of named brands on the receipt, though comparing his receipt to mine, I can see that supermarkets now note the supermarket brand name on the line of each product, such as ‘Tesco fish fingers’ whereas A18’s example simply lists ‘fish fingers’. It’s interesting to note that, though this directive is on shopping in Britain, there are subtle differences between receipts in Britain at the time of this directive (in 1995) and now.
The first flyer I came across was submitted by F1373, who sent in a 28-page response to the directive, mostly detailing her recent experience of shopping in America. This response is beautifully written in that its tone feels as though a friend has written you a letter sharing her experience abroad; her excitement for the ‘shopper’s paradise’ which is the American Mall is evident throughout. The flyer is for a mall in Florida and features both a categorised shop list and a map of the shopping mall, and F1373 talks at length about the incomparable facilities, scale and cheap pricing of American shops compared to British ones. In our modern world of YouTube ‘come shopping with me’ and ‘haul’ videos, it is easy to take for granted our awareness of other cultures’ shopping experiences and habits, but reading this response highlights to the modern reader how this hasn’t always been the case, and provides an insight into the sense of awe which can be found in the mundane differences between (even similar) cultures.
Finally, I’d like to highlight the less explicit visual elements within responses which arise through paper reuse. Many respondents choose to write to MO on the back of letters or scrap paper, for example R2144 writing on the reverse of sheet music, S1399 on the reverse of paper used to draw chemical formulae and T2543 on the reverse of a letter. We can infer certain things about the respondents from these choices, such as considering them environment or budget-conscious individuals by choosing to reuse paper. We could also use these elements to speculate that R2144 might be a musician, S1399 could be a chemist and T2543 lives in/near Dudley. These speculations illustrate how reading MO responses can surprise us by providing glimpses not only into respondents’ opinions on the topics they’re discussing, but also their wider world views or experiences.
Exploring this set of responses has illustrated how MO submissions can provide insight into both individuals’ and cultures’ nuanced differences in everyday habits such as shopping. If you’re interested in exploring the topic of this directive more, check out this book by Jenny Shaw (one of the commissioners of this directive), which partly draws on insights gleaned from the analysis of these MO responses:
Shaw, Jenny. Shopping: Social and Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge: Polity, 2010
Thank you for reading. Next month’s blog will explore the creative and visual responses to the ‘Animals and Humans’ directive from 2009.