Anyone who's visited a high street recently will have witnessed the proliferation of pound shops where what the Americans call 'mom and pop' stores used to stand.
My local shopping bunker - a charmless concrete temple to convenience - boasts B & M bargain stores stuffed cheek by jowl with a Poundland outfit and a gargantuan Quality Save.
It's not all terrible. In fact, it can be heaven for the browser with time to kill and at least a quid in their pocket.
There are copious things you hadn't previously realised that you couldn't live without and some of them are quite useful.
Gazebos for a penny less than a tenner, cut-price cat food, sweets, trinkets, all manner of exciting things extruded from plastic and rendered un-pass-by-able by those nice people in China.
Exspense
If there is a rub then it's the fact that value comes at the expense of choice. Poundland is a place where the shelves are filled not necessarily with what people really, really want, but what the stores' buyer can get his hands on really cheaply.
If cars were cheap enough to be sold in Poundland, then you'd most likely find a Chevrolet Cruze blocking the gardening aisle.
Come to think of it, maybe there is a market for an On-The-Road for £11,995 outlet.
It's not necessarily a car that you'd go out shopping for (the list would say things like VW Jetta and Ford Focus) but if you stumbled upon it, closed your eyes and tried it, you'd discover that it's actually good enough for your requirements.
To put that another way, the new Chevrolet Cruze is a little like the can of Shmeinz beans and sausage you buy only to discover that they're only slightly less beans and sausagey than the ones made by Heinz... and much cheaper too!
It's a saloon which marks something of a turning point in motoring - the moment at which something sold for small bucks does a job so reasonable that you really don't need to spend any more.
Chevrolet Cruze
No comments:
Post a Comment