On Dark Shops and Dastardly Deceit.

One of the pages on this morning’s BBC News website carried a warning from the motoring organisations. They were wont to advise people venturing out to take advantage of the Boxing Day sales that they should be prepared for heavy traffic congestion because retail outlets would be very busy today.

I decided to pay a rare second visit of the week to Ashbourne, my local town, partly to join in with the merry throng for a change and partly to visit Costa Coffee again. Although once a regular, I hadn’t been into dear old Costa since the beginning of lockdown and had fallen out of the habit. I felt in need of some self-administered tlc and thought that a medium Americano in convivial surroundings might do the trick. (I did say that there wasn’t much out there to interest me, didn’t I?)

Ashbourne was closed.

The retail park with its big national names was all boarded up and padlocked. The shops in the town centre were shrouded in darkness and deathly quiet. Even the filling station was closed, which is something I don’t think I’ve ever seen on a Boxing Day before.  It reminded me that Ashbourne is a very traditional sort of place. It’s the sort of place which tends to regard rightness as a function of tradition rather than rational consideration.

But I spotted to my delight that Costa Coffee was the one establishment open in the high street, and so I went in. The queue of people stretched from the service area at the back almost to the front door and most of the tables were occupied, so I turned around and came back out again. I dislike crowded places, you see, preferring quiet corners in the vicinity of windows so I can watch the body language of passers by

And then I discovered one other establishment open as usual – the town centre’s only discount store operating under the name The Yorkshire Trading Company. Every window was plastered with big notices proclaiming:

Everything

Must

Go

75% Off

It surprised me greatly because that’s the language of a business about to fold and needing to dispose of its stock quickly, and this store has only been open for a couple of months. I decided to go in and peruse the massive reductions on offer. I found only one small product lightly discounted. All the others, as far as I could tell, were priced normally. The notices were clearly a dishonest ruse to attract footfall, and there, I thought, lies another casualty of today’s post-truth society.