The discount fever

It's been dubbed 'BBQ fever' and it's the Youtube clip which has been making the rounds in a big way this week. The clip, which is being forwarded and commented upon extensively, shows your typical Monday and Thursday morning scene at a Lidl discount store in Malta. Those are the days when new stock is rolled out - and also the days when the action hots up at the stores.

The commotion was captured on film by an unknown person who was up and about at 6.30 a.m. He was not alone. Assembled outside the still-closed doors of Lidl in the cold grey light of early morning there was a sizeable crowd. The queue snaked out into the car park.

Although the onscreen image was fuzzy, viewers could make out an air of feverish excitement among the shoppers. They were already jostling away with their mammoth carrier bags a full hour away from opening time.

If ever there was proof that people believed that the early bird catches the worm, this was it. Huddled against complete strangers instead of their quilt at home, these people were nothing if not determined to get their hands on the object of their desires. The anonymous cameraman guessed that the coveted item was a barbeque on a trolley costing €19.98. He was right.

As soon as the doors opened, the Charge of the Tight Brigade made a beeline for the barbecue package. Pointy arms at the ready, they dashed to the spot, scattering other goods and slower shoppers in their wake.

There were squawks of triumph when the leap onto the barbecue kit mound was successful and shoppers emerged from the fray with a haul of more than one kit. Having successfully stripped that particular shelve bare, our shopping locusts turned their attention to other areas.

In a few minutes flat the raid on the discount mecca was complete and the early-rising bargain-hunters were trooping to the till, mission accomplished, barbecue secured and blissfully unaware that their shopping sortie had been caught on film for all to watch and comment about.

Most of the comments were quite scathing. Some asked why the possibility of acquiring a flimsy grilling apparatus should inspire such purchasing panic. Were we trying to overtake Australia as the No. 1 barbie nation of the world? Was a barbecue on wheels the one thing which could help us ride out the recession on a haze of grilled burgers and sizzled sausages?

Or was this display of bargain-mania yet another throwback from the dark days of Old Labour when all commodities were scarce and you couldn't buy foreign toothpaste for love or money? Had our years of foreign-chocolate-deprivation scarred us permanently, turning us into Bargainzillas with a compulsion to shop? Could this be another 'Only in Malta' happening?

Actually the shoppers' stampede is not a uniquely Maltese phenomenon. It's one which has been seen in other countries, increasingly more frequently in recent times. When the fashion-without-frills retailer Primark opened its store at Marble Arch in Oxford Street, more than 3,000 bargain hounds hurled themselves into the melee, scrambling around to grab an £8 pair of jeans or a £2 bikini.

Some of them had camped overnight on the pavement outside the store in a bid to be the first to get their mitts on the cheap high-street gear. The shopping frenzy got so bad that horse-mounted bobbies had to be called in to control the situation.

It's not the first time that such chaos has ensued during a shop opening. In 2005, five people had to be hospitalised when an Ikea store opened in Edmonton in North London. When Kate Moss launched her clothes line for Topshop in 2007, there was pandemonium. But the most horrific incident of crazed shopper mobbing took place in New York last November at the start of the sale season.

Crowds had been gathering outside the Walmart superstore since the early hours of the morning just before it was scheduled to open at 5 a.m., the doors shattered under the weight of the crowd. Jdimytai Damour, a burly 34-year old temporary worker was trampled to death by customers charging towards the cut-price hardware.

What was even more sickening was the way that the people behaved when the shop was being cleared after Damour died. They started yelling that they had been queuing for a long time. They just wanted to carry on shopping.

Following the incident, there was an attempt to find out who was to blame for the bedlam? Was it Walmart which had slashed its prices? Or was it the media which had hyped the first day of sales as if it was an event of major importance?

A useful insight into the psychology of the obsessive shopper comes from John Naish, the author of Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More.

Naish says, "Although our conscious brain knows that we have got everything we need to survive, our primitive brains are primed to believe that we live in a world of scarcity and starvation and death is always around the corner. When something's on sale it feels scarce. When you see a lot of people queuing outside a shop, your primitive brain thinks it must be for something really vital."

Naish sees the shopper stampede as an innate fasting response, built into us from our earliest days when our ancestors had to fight for their share of food or die, and aggravated by the financial turmoil. Although nowadays we're just queuing for a slashed-price outfit or for a budget barbecue and not for vital resources, there's still this roiling panic going on inside our heads.

Retailers are aware of this, that's why they up the ante, advertising their heavily-discounted wares. Incidents like the Barbecue Blitz are simply the consumers' response to that stimulus.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt