Retail Therapy Scam
Illawarra Mercury
Tuesday April 13, 2004
THE latest exercise craze sweeping the world is ... shopping.
That's right. Apparently shopping is good for you.
All that time spent trawling the aisles for life's little necessities can now be added to your weekly training schedule.
All those hours spent agonising over racks of clothes and bargain dump bins are actually benefiting your waistline.
Or so we were told in a fluffy little article headed ``Health a true bargain" in a weekend newspaper. According to ``new research", women walk an average 214km a year shopping and it is ``the most common way to improve fitness".
Accompanying the ground-breaking story was an enormous, eye-catching picture of an attractive young blonde.
She was wearing a cheeky smile, along with a low-cut, sequined evening gown which displayed her assets to their best advantage.
As she was neither exercising nor shopping, it took a while to figure out what she had to do with the story.
It soon became clear - sort of.
The pretty woman was a starlet claiming that ``the best part of her exercise regime" comprised the long walk along Oxford St, Paddington's shopping strip.
``I am trying to avoid it at the moment though - my credit card can't really handle the work-out," she was quoted as saying.
Aw, what a cutie.
The article then quoted a fitness instructor who conducts twice weekly ``mall walking" groups for seniors. Oddly there was no picture of a pack of old people shuffling through an arcade or marching on the spot on an escalator.
No sequins, perhaps?
The final sentence of this intriguing piece revealed that the research had been done by - you guessed it - a big retail company. Which one? The global giant Woolworths.
A quick check on Google and suspicions were confirmed. The same silly little story had appeared all around the world, with all the same silly little statistics.
A Manchester News story quoted a 29-year-old town planner confessing: ``I'm ashamed to say that shopping is the only decent exercise I get."
Aw, another cutie.
A BBC story began: ``Forget the gym. The way to get fit could be a long shopping spree ..."
For added gravitas it quoted a British Heart Foundation representative forced to agree that brisk, regular walking was a good way to control weight, blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol levels.
Of course walking is good for you. Just ask John Howard, who figures out his next assault on the public consciousness during his morning constitutionals.
But shopping?
Why not the lunch-time dash to the bank?
Why not carrying a child who refuses to walk?
Why not forgetting where you left your vehicle in a car park?
Where are all the stories about how good those activities are for the modern body?
There aren't any. Not because they are plainly silly stories. But because they would not be to anyone's advantage.
In the Darwinian scheme of news production the shopping-is-exercise story has all the winning characteristics.
For journalists short of time it has ready-made facts just perfect for cutting and pasting into quick and easy paragraphs.
Finding a ``real" person to interview is as simple as picking up the phone and calling a publicity agency keen to promote one of their clients, or even a girlfriend willing to be quoted and have her photo taken.
For news editors short of resources the story is an ideal stand-by in case nothing else pops up, and adds a light and feel-good balance to the dreariness of car accidents, tax hikes and local government scandals. It also pleases advertisers by seamlessly joining two female obsessions - shopping and weight-loss - and puts readers in a spending frame of mind.
Presumably Woolworths spent a minuscule fraction of their daily earnings on commissioning the research that resulted in coverage across the world; in-kind advertising they didn't have to pay for. A true bargain indeed.
Of course, this particular story is fairly harmless. Anyone who believed shopping was good for them was probably a soft advertising target in the first place.
But, if you think about what other stories have similar dubious origins, you start to wonder how much you believe is based on dodgy material supplied by unknown sources.
How much of what you think and read is carefully manufactured by the backroom planning of multinational companies and their faceless marketing teams?
How much of what you spend is determined by people who have their shareholders' interests at heart?
The people behind the shopping story have a done a lot of research. Very little of it was about how many kilometres you walk at the shops, but they know a hell of a lot about you.
Whoever they are, you can bet the last thing they care about is how much exercise you get.
Cute, huh?
TOMORROW Community Forum: Innovation in fathering
© 2004 Illawarra Mercury