Situationism Alive and Kicking
Back in Malcolm McLaren's day situationist shopping involved a mass Santa invasion of local toy stores to hand out toys free to kids. Nowadays the Internet and pure old-fashioned weirdness has given situationism as new impetus.
Firstly The Economist reports on how Chinese shoppers are organising themselves into mass-buying teams to get the best deals -- they converge on stores at a pre-appointed time and haggle. Tuangou, or team-buying, aims to drive through unprecedented bargains by combing the reach of the Internet with the power of the mob. The practice originated in online chat-rooms but has now developed into specialist websites such as 51tuaugou.com and www.teambuy.com. According to Zhang Wei, who helped to set up teambuy.com less than six months ago, the site now has 10,000 registered members. The company now plans to expand into Beijing and Shanghai.
The practice is believed to have developed out of sheer accident as shoppers chatting online realised that they could drive the best deals if they worked together. Bargaining is the norm in China where getting a discount is often a sort of insurance against ending up with badly made or fake goods.
Unsurprisngly, some retailers aren't keen on the practice. LVMH for instance say that they always insist on fixed prices in China -- after all they have the counterfieters to battle. But others encourage the practice in the hope of recovering lost margins through the extra volume. The Gome store in Guangzhou, for example, closed its doors to 'normal' customers when the team buyers showed up a fortnight ago and even gave each of them a goody bag as they left. The Economist sees this phenomena as a sort of 'capitalism for the people':
Team buying turns haggling, a tradition in China, into an art-form. That such aggressive consumer behaviour has arisen out of a country without much of a consumer economy and weak individual rights is less surprising than it might seem. In the countryside there are more and more organised protests against government corruption and dictatorial landlords, with even poor people using technology like the internet and mobile phones to help. Now their urban, middle-class brethren are adopting their tactics - if only for shopping. However, if China's economy ever slumps, urban consumers could use their organisational skills to confront the government directly. Beijing might be watching the spread of team buying with trepidation.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports on a gang of thieves dressed as superheroes who have been liberating products from stores across Germany. In one incident, supermarket shoppers were left aghast as half a dozen costumed superheroes invaded a store and filled trolleys with some $2000 worth of fancy produce such as Kobe beef and Manchego cheese. Before leaving (without paying) the thieves left flowers and a note for the cashiers at Fresh Paradise saying:
"n case you do not know us yet: We are Santa Guevara, Spider Mum, Operaistorix and Multiflex. We are precarious superheroes... Without the power of superheroes, there is no chance for survival in this city of millionaires. Although we produce the wealth of Hamburg, we hardly have anything to show for it. It does not have to stay like this.
The group later posted a statement online claiming that the stolen goods had been given to the needy, including children at kindergarten.
It was not the first time the gang had struck: A year earlier, about 20 masked people barged into the Seven Seas Restaurant, a posh bistro overlooking the Elba River. The intruders dumped the entire buffet spread into trash bags before fleeing.
The self-styled caped crusaders belong to a movement called Hamburg for Free, a loosely organized network with a simple ideology: People shouldn't have to pay for anything they might want. Instead, they should just walk into a store and help themselves.
The people behind Hamburg for Free say that the root of their ideology is basic: economic frustration. The port city, with 1.7 million residents, is home to more millionaires than any other German town. But the city also has an unemployment rate of 11.3 percent, and the posh lofts and waterfront estates are a stark contrast to the squatters and homeless who wander the streets.
Although the police have failed to apprehend any members of the group The Washington Post put in a call to the student government offices at the University of Hamburg and got an interview:
"Appearing in a park on a recent afternoon are a young woman and man who claim to have participated in the heist at Fresh Paradise.
"It's not that we hate rich people, but we want this kind of wealth for everybody. That's the point," says the man, a thin, dark-haired guy in his twenties who describes himself as a university student nearing graduation. "We wanted to show that there is rebellion, that you can stand up and fight."
The woman, blond and soft-spoken, says she used to work in a small clothing store but hated the "bad working conditions," like having to stay until 8 some nights [!].
In addition to food thieving, Hamburg for Free also encourages individual acts of rebellion, they say. Favorite tactics include taking longer-than-allowed coffee breaks at work, daring to ride the subway without a ticket and downloading pirated software and music from the Internet.
However, Carsten Sievers, general manager of the Fresh Paradise grocery, is dubious of their claims to be modern-day Robin Hoods.
"How many poor people will really enjoy a bottle of champagne or a high-value cheese?" he asks. "I think the object was just to get in the newspapers and get publicity for their ideas. To help the poor people, there is a right way and a wrong way. You cannot use the voice of Robin Hood to promote yourself."
In reality, he says, the caper was much more low-key than the gang's bravado suggested. A conspirator in street clothes performed a reconnaissance mission to the store ahead of time, Sievers says, and stuffed several hand-held shopping baskets with groceries. The baskets were placed unnoticed on the floor near the store's front entrance. When the costumed performers arrived on the scene, they ducked in for only an instant to snatch the baskets and flee without a word. More like cowardly crooks than superheroes, Sievers believes.
"That was it. That was all we saw," he says. "One of our girls tried to follow them, but she lost them and they got away."
Also lost in the myth/PR stunt surrounding the crime, Sievers adds, is a longtime store policy:twice a week, employees box up dated organic produce and other perishables that have been passed over and donate them to a local social-services agency to feed the hungry and the poor. Maybe the situationist 'superheroes' should donate their time to that...
And then, of course, there is the gang of violent transvestites currently plaguing New Orleans.
