Jane Caro: We Can Buy Anything We Want, but Service Is Gone

The exchange, she says, "was social, mutually beneficial and human."

Her grandfather was about to expand his little draper's empire into three shops when the war intervened and put a damper on his plans. At 39 he was called up to serve in the Eighth Army. Caro says a successful shop then relied on a wide range of satisfied, regular customers, and the customer was always right.

From customer to consumer

Caro recalls her father, a marketing executive, talking enthusiastically in the 1960s about "self-serve supermarkets". He also praised things in the United States called hypermarkets, which she thinks became the Kmarts of today.

Around then, she says, the word "customer" began to be replaced by the word "consumer". Consumers were told supermarkets would be better because retailers could lower prices by buying in bulk and reducing staff.

Caro accepts they were better in many ways, especially at increasing retail profits. But she says they began "the dehumanisation of the marketplace".

Two words, two roles

She draws a sharp line between the terms. A customer, to her, is a person, often a woman with a shopping basket and a list, who consciously decides what to buy and from whom.

A consumer is something else. The job of a consumer, Caro writes, is "to consume endlessly and voraciously", serving their own greed and that of the corporations pushing goods at them.

Some shops still serve customers, she says. Her examples are bespoke butchers, bookshops, expensive delis and patisseries.

She also points to the bank manager, once one of the most important members of any community. People accepted less-than-top-notch products from their bank for decades because the manager of the local branch was so lovely and helpful. "He is long gone and so are we," she writes.

No one to call

Caro says the fall in the level of service shoppers expect or receive is now much worse. She finds it difficult to think of people who buy things as much more than prey.

Buyers, she says, cannot contact any kind of human being when a purchase or transaction goes wrong. Her own example is recent. She bought a new Fitbit from an online retailer and could not get it to pair with her phone.