Diary of a Shopkeeper, 25th August 2024

‘And here is where we’ll demolish the cathedral to build the shopping mall…’

Manhattan Transfer was a jazzy acapella group famous in the 1970s for hits such as ‘Chanson d’Amour’ and ‘On a Little Street in Singapore.’ Texas Transfer is a bidding tactic in bridge designed to counter your opponent’s one notrump or two notrump openings. Language Transfer is where the accent and structure of your native language infect a new one you’re trying to learn. Balance Transfer is where I move £17 from my savings account to my current account the day before payday to avoid overdraft charges.

And if all of that’s rather confusing, it’s a successful demonstration of the Gruen Transfer, in which an individual is confronted by overwhelming verbal or visual information, and so loses track of their intentions. Typically, it’s a trick used by large stores and shopping malls. A customer comes into the mall planning to buy a suitcase from John Lewis, is dazzled and bamboozled by the vast array of choice spread in front of them, and leaves with six pairs of socks, a scented candle and a Lego model of the Starship Enterprise.

The Austrian architect who named the effect, Victor Gruen, came to hate the dominance of shopping malls. ‘I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments,’ he said, of the constructions he had spent most of his working life designing. ‘They destroyed our cities.’

Luckily we don’t have any malls here. The closest is the wonderful William Shearer’s in Victoria Street, founded in 1857, two years before James and Margaret Kirkness opened their doors on Broad Street. As I’m sure you know they sell everything from a fruit scone to a shotgun, fresh crab to fishing tackle; Christmas trees, midgie hoods, ice cream for dogs, grass seed by the ton and fiery wasabi by the tube.

On first entering Shearer’s, the Gruen Transfer exerts its forcefield, but after years of practice I have learned to resist it. Excuse me for a moment while I lift my midgie mask to take another bite of this wasabi-spread scone.

All of which leads me to ask: is that how customers feel when they walk into my shop? Twenty-something years ago, when I started to focus on selling wine, I was determined to avoid any fustiness or snobbery. I didn’t come from a wine drinking background and wasn’t confident, to start with, about my knowledge. So I was passionate about making everything in the shop accessible and clearly communicated.

And yet over the years I’ve heard the wail many times, “I don’t know what to choose! What’s the breed of wine I like? Argh, I can’t find…I’m lost…it’s all mixed up!” Of course it isn’t all mixed up: it’s arranged and signposted in what is meant to be a very clear and conventional way, that I thought no one could find anything but crystal clear. I was wrong.

Having tried every variation in organisation and signage over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that…nothing works! Just seeing two or three hundred different bottles on our shelves is enough to dazzle and bamboozle many customers. It’s the Gruen Transfer in inadvertent operation. Except the customers don’t grab a random £40 bottle of Barolo in their panic. They just pace nervously back and forth, looking increasingly worried, until we go and rescue them. I’ve seen us literally pull people back in the door as they leave, muttering, “I wanted Port but you don’t have any.” Yes we do! Of course we do! You’ve been standing right in front of it for ten minutes!

The only way to banish the Gruen Transfer forever would be to have ten bottles of a single Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc on one shelf, with ten bottles of an Italian Pinot Grigio just below. On the red shelf we’d have ten bottles of an Argentinean Malbec and ten bottles of a Chilean Merlot. On the central island, a pyramid of Port.

I feel my brain going numb. It may be the thought of having to work in a shop that isn’t overflowing with choice and the full bounty of the wine world. Or it may be the effects of the wasabi scone.

The photo shows Victor Gruen on the right, and an unidentified individual (possibly an official from OIC planning department) on the left. Luckily for us, Gruen found the council’s planning application system too onerous and left the county before he could knock down St Magnus Cathedral. (It must be true: the cathedral’s still there, isn’t it?)

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 29th August 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions