With shops in England due to reopen, customers can expect a very different experience. Do your research online first, buy before you try – and avoid jeans
Picture the scene: you walk into your favourite clothes store for the first time in three months, check your mask is covering your nose and mouth, and pump sanitiser into your hands. And then you spot it – the perfect gingham dress. Just the mood-boosting, picnic-appropriate fillip your wardrobe needs, and it is just there, on the other side of the shop floor. But, instead of making a beeline for it, you have to take the long way round, following the one-way system marked out in arrow stickers on the floor, pausing when the shopper in front of you does in order to observe the two-metre-rule (the pandemic-era grandmother’s footsteps that we have grown used to in the supermarket aisles). And then – disaster – the masked shopper in front of you reaches for your gingham dress and takes the last one in your size. Which means that, if she doesn’t buy it, it will be headed for quarantine in the stock room, rather than back to the shop floor.
From 15 June, clothes shops will be able to reopen in England, just a few days after their counterparts in Northern Ireland. The rest of the UK will eventually follow suit. Some people will have no interest in diving straight back into frenzied consumerism, what with the aforementioned frenzied consumerism being implicated in the rapid global spread of the coronavirus catastrophe. Some people will be constrained by financial circumstances. Some people may quite fancy a shopping trip just for a change of scene, but will still be trying to jigsaw together the jagged pieces of work and home-schooling children who are not back in the classroom.
Order several pieces at once – if you only order one, you might convince yourself you like it to avoid returning it
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