from icWales newspaper

So, are you Cardiff’s biggest shopper?

THE hunt is on for South Wales’ biggest shopaholics! A group of super shoppers is being sought to help decide the shopping future of the capital. The people behind the St David’s 2 development are hoping to make the city one of the UK’s shopping hotspots. They are working hard to bring in all the best shops to the new centre, but need a team of 10 super shoppers to tell them which new stores people really want to see in the development. The lucky shoppers will be among the first to know which shops have signed up for St David’s 2 and will get sneak previews of what the centre will look like.

The super shoppers team will be made up of people of all ages and from all walks of life. The 10 will be treated as VIPs and will be taken to all the centre’s exclusive events. They will be given a £100 gift card to be spent in the St David’s Centre as well as gifts and goodie bags along the way. St David’s 2 project director Simon Armstrong said: “We are looking for people who love shopping, from teenagers to grandparents, who want to be involved with the city’s most exciting new development and who can give us their valued opinions as we move forward.

“This development will become a big part of Cardiff city centre and we want to involve its future customers as it starts to take shape. We’ll be asking them for their views over the next two years. They are, after all, the people who will be shopping in the new stores and eating in the new restaurants.”

Sifting through the rubble of the post Christmas slump can be a gruesome business. The pile of unwanted gifts, the undignified scrum of the sales, and the looming horror of January’s credit card bills are enough to weaken the resolve of the most dedicated consumer (unless you’re in the market for a half price leather sofa or bathroom suite, in which case your time has come). But this year’s comedown is especially grim, rounding off as it does a twelve months consumer guilt trip. From killer plastic bags to sweat shop T-shirts, almost every item on our shopping bill has been red flagged. Perhaps the nagging has been justified, but it’s a curious state of affairs when consumers are shamed into ethical self-audits but the industries that produce the stuff remain free to do business as usual.

During this year’s dogfight for share of the UK broadband market, Carphone Warehouse offered a free Dell laptop to every new customer. Punters snapped up the deal in droves, regardless if they needed a new computer or not. This kind of retailing, one might argue, is competitive supply to healthy consumer demand. But in an age when the UK dumps two million working PC’s into landfills each year, the practice is really nothing short of reckless. Companies that flood the market with disposable produce take no responsibility beyond the factory gates. In clearing up the mess that's left behind, it is currently the role of the consumer to bare the financial cost and the ethical blame. Why are the companies that profit from these transactions not made to help out?

The notion of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) isn’t new – it’s just taken an eternity to become law. EPR was born in the mid ‘90s, a policy between OECD nations with which to tackle wasteful disposability in consumer products. If manufacturers were required to take back and recycle end of life goods, so the thinking went, the enormous reprocessing costs would encourage companies to produce and market goods with a longer life span. EPR is taken seriously in some parts of the EU; in Ireland, suppliers are forced to take back and recycle old fridges whenever they deliver new ones.

Seventeen years on, this directive has finally become law in the UK. Since August 2007, manufacturers and suppliers of electrical goods have been legally obliged to take back products from customers, and reprocess the materials responsibly. In theory, the price that you pay for a product includes its safe disposal when you’re done. All you have to do is return it to the shop from which it was bought. Companies that supply electrical goods are legally obliged to inform the consumer of their EPR schemes. Non-compliance is subject to an unlimited fine from the Crown Court. If all this comes as news to you, it is because the Government has failed spectacularly to publicise this law. Unsurprisingly, British business isn’t in any hurry to promote EPR itself.

Try taking one of your unwanted Christmas gadgets back to the store it was bought from, and ask an assistant about their Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment scheme. They won’t have a clue what you’re on about. There will be no signage within the shop to help. If you do find a store willing to take it off your hands, it will most likely end up in the waste bin. The DTI’s virtual non-policing of this law renders EPR a voluntary scheme at best. And so the UK remains on course to dump another 2 million tones of electrical equipment this coming year.

Alongside electrical gadgets, the UK collectively threw out 900 million items of clothing last year, but the flow of cheap disposable clothes isn’t being managed - if anything it’s becoming a free for all. On Jan 1st 2008, the EU will lift the import quotas currently placed on Chinese textiles. A new wave of impossibly cheap jeans and t-shirts is about to flood our high streets, the scale of which we have never seen before.
If you caught your child buying drugs in the school playground, you’d naturally want to reprimand him or her for being so stupid. But you’d also seek due justice for the dealer - you certainly wouldn’t allow him to carry on supplying at the school gates. It’s high time that the public - titillated into consuming, then chastised for doing so – demand compensation from the dealers. Consumer goods mountains don’t pile up by themselves.