Retail Therapy in Athens: In Defence of Old-Fashioned Human Expertise
Tom Hall makes a dispassionate appeal for the romance of a more humane retail experience. Shop your way to happiness with the experts of Athens.
At a certain point in life it becomes clear that some of those ingrained habits and preferences, rituals even, are not going to suddenly disappear no matter how many resolutions you make or books on incremental change sit unread on your undusted shelves. At this point, in an effort to shore up the embattled sense of self worth, the work of the lazy thinker starts as one casts around for a way to reframe these foibles as somehow intentional and, if possible, desirable and admirable. So, it was for me with online shopping.
I sat watching the familiar brown boxes pile up outside the doors of family, friends and colleagues, wondering like a Dickensian orphan at the hidden treasures contained within the cardboard snowdrift and feeling a palpable sense of my failure as a modern Homo Commercialensis. This wasn’t helped by the fact that an opened box, much like an impenetrable opera lyric, is packed with potential, an unrealised wellspring of magical things that weren’t mine. It didn’t matter that most of the boxes were probably filled with bulk bought buyer’s remorse just as finding out that a surprising amount of Italian opera is apparently about household chores.
Amazingly, in both cases, the romance persists. I rationalised my deficiencies by loudly bemoaning the death of the high street and quoting stats about fast fashion return rates and their effect on the planet, but this was just a feint and secretly I meant to take my retail therapy digital like the rest of the world. My path to personal acceptance was slow, probably because I hadn’t ordered any useful books on the subject or signed up to a course as seen on social media, or maybe I just wasn’t eating enough avocados. I was recently confronted with evidence that the journey is complete and that I’m now a proud bricks-and-mortar (and trestle tables) shopper. I can pinpoint the moment I reached my final destination quite clearly.
I was talking to a friend of mine who is not just a committed, and skilled, online purchaser of goods and services but also a self-trained expert on the dark arts of e-commerce. The conversation was triggered by my nephew who had been the victim of a “brushing” scam. This is where someone will send a series of products to a house to get their delivery score up, or to confirm personal data. The fact that even scams are nonsensical these days is further grist to my mill.
There are apps that review the reviews, ignoring bots and obviously skewed reviews, and supposedly leaving only trusted sources. Presumably, somewhere on a tech blog or shopping site, there is an article that aggregates and reviews the apps that review the reviews. It turns out that not only is someone watching the watchmen but someone is watching the watchers of the watchmen. And it’s more watchmen.
One of reasons for my commercial Luddism is that I am particularly susceptible to the modern phenomenon of the paradox of choice. This is the idea that there are so many options available for every decision, no matter how minor, that we become paralysed and ultimately unsatisfied. At this point we turn to external sources of support and validation so that our terror at making the wrong choice of toilet paper subscription doesn’t accidentally destroy our sense of personal identity, leaving us a weeping mess on the bathroom floor with nothing to sop it up.
There are numerous digital tools available to us in our increasingly inconvenient pursuits of convenience. Videos on social media will show you what you should do by providing a window into the shiny, happy lives of people whose decisions were often made for them by product placement executives. There is, as many Tiktok videos claim, but rarely elaborate on, another way. There is an age-old solution to this problem, and it is a biological algorithm accessed in a contextually appropriate environment. Or rather, an expert in their shop.
Getting old-fashioned human expertise with the depth of knowledge and passion that comes with it is an incredibly rewarding activity that many of us can engage with on a daily basis. And it delivers on a number of the other hottest trends as identified in the advisosphere.
There is a growing movement towards “micro-learning” as opposed to mindlessly scrolling. Want to stop “doom-scrolling” and to start “micro-learning”? In the course of conducting interviews for this article I have learned about the many nutritional benefits of chard, I’ve finally understood what the term “poplin” refers to, I’ve learned that when it comes to trousers, I like a “Naples cut” and that, given my tastes in literature, I should start reading Korean novels.
We are often told that gratitude is a panacea for a whole host of modern ills. While I leave most online transactions with a conscious feeling of having chosen badly and/or lightly ripped off, if not outright fleeced, a productive trip to a shop can leave me with a glowing sense of satisfaction, and yes, a genuine, non-Goopy, sense of gratitude.
A lot of online “passion” is performative and comes with the implicit promise or threat of an incomplete life badly lived. Finding one’s passion, often with a hashtag symbol floating nearby to make sure you get the point, is a core selling point of many influencers. The passion that I saw in the experts below was a quieter and more internalised form. It was the whisper of deep knowledge and true understanding rather than the shout of a passing fancy. A marriage rather than a fling.
So do yourself a favour and go shopping. But, as the adverts say, don’t take my word for it. Here’s what I learned from talking to the experts.
To listen to Christos from Christakis talk about the breathability and structure of voile cotton is to see that he understands the blissful demands of a Greek summer on an island and has found the foil in voile. Or to witness the excitement on Nikos’ face when he sees a regular coming to his stall and he has a particularly fine crop of celeriac root. These moments demonstrate that passion is actually an imminently practical impulse rather than an inspiring HR poster.
To use the language of the boardroom, passion, properly applied, leads to positive outcomes. I like to think of myself as passionate about cooking but I’m not going to say that anymore, instead I will hand someone a homemade cheese straw and look wise. The importance of collaboration in the acquisition and maintenance of expertise is on some levels obvious but it stood in stark contrast to a lot of the online alternatives. The large online marketplaces have a business model that is essentially extractive. While appearing to foster collaborative networks of third-party sellers, they actually centralise power and isolate small businesses from each other. These small businesses end up as dependent clients rather than collaborative partners.
The businesses I talked to are part of genuinely collaborative networks of mutually enriching partners, a web that extends out and reinforces rather than erodes.
Christakis has been working with some of their fabric suppliers since their founding in 1947, with relationships, as well as the skills, being passed down through generations. They want to work with artisans that they trust rather than setting up a gladiatorial race which can only lead to the bottom. Collaboration is so fundamental to these businesses that it can be an outcome in its own right.
For Ivy from Anavasi Maps, her Syntagma shop is the brick-and-mortar tip of a multifaceted cartological iceberg, but it is also a source of vital collaborative opportunity for her, meaning she can connect with her wider industry and showcase designers, artists and mountain guides while continually building her own knowledge. A virtuous circle that benefits all parties. Talking to Ivy illustrates another vital element of the benefits of collaboration for small business experts, that with the customer. Anyone who has spent more than a few seconds online will be aware of the intense neediness of online retailers to know “how are they doing?” Automated feedback forms can on occasion precede the product or service that you are supposed to be feeding back on. I was once asked about my stay at a hotel before arrival. The suspicion is that the investment in these platforms is at the cost of genuine product development.
All the experts I talked to said that interactions with their customers craft what they make and sell. Ivy from Anavasi Maps was characteristically eloquent on the subject. She talks about the fact that a paper map is never perfect, never finished. The user of the physical map becomes a collaborator with the cartographer on recreating the landscape. As opposed to an online map service which is designed to get you from A to B as quickly as possible, the collaboration required for a physical map places the owner in the landscape in a way that makes one feel part of something bigger.
It is a truism that specialisation allows for a depth of knowledge that generalisation doesn’t. Each of the businesses I talked to were specialised to one degree or other.
Christos at Christakis is clear that the best way to use their gentlemen’s clothing shop is by first talking to one of the highly knowledgeable staff rather than simply browsing racks. On my first visit I was gently corrected by his mother Vicky on my waist measurement. She was, of course, right and the trousers I bought fitted much better than most I owned, for obvious reasons. Their timeless take on the smarter end of men’s clothing comes to life under their expert guidance and if you talk about what the job you want the clothes to do, you can on occasion leave with something wonderfully, and usefully, unexpected.
Nikos’ stall at the laiki sells what he himself grows, which is mainly delicious and nutritious things in shades of green that would make a Leprechaun weep for the old country. Although he sells bunches of ruby red radishes as well as cauliflowers and beetroots, I think of him as a master of chlorophyll and we’ll often make a salad that is simply whatever salad leaves he has with a blend of all his herbs, simply dressed with olive oil, lemon juice and salt. I affectionately think of this as Salad Nikos and I think I could sell it on prescription as medicine as it feels so healthy.
Rather than aiming for completeness, I would argue that Fani at Booktique has taken a lifetime of generational experience in literature and objects to curate a compact space that reflects her excellent taste. The shop rewards repeat visits and the development of a personal relationship. Both her and the team have read a startling number of the books on the shelves. Being able to talk to someone who has read a book and can place it in a continuum of authors and genres is a valuable specialisation indeed and one that I take advantage of often. This ability is also showcased by their lucky dip book selection of wrapped books with moods and themes written on the wrapping paper covers. I’m struggling to think of a better antidote to the paradox of choice than these enticing presents sitting on the counter.
Perhaps the most specialised of the people I talked to was Ivy from Anavasi Maps whose marvellous cabinet of travel wonders on Voulis is a small part of a wide-ranging but highly focused cartographical enterprise. Ivy is such an expert on maps and all things cartographic that when we talked, she had just returned from teaching artists how to use maps and cartography in their work. The business side of the business advises NGOs and the Greek fire service, amongst others, and this depth of knowledge feeds back into the products on display. The shop has abundant travel guides, as well as maps that are as educational as they are beautiful. The globes are particularly popular. Given the fundamental role that cartography played in the development of modern civilisation and even the post medieval sense of our place in the world, having access to an academic level of knowledge on this topic is something to be celebrated, and cherished.
It is perhaps significant that each of the people I talked to were part of an inherited tradition in their own space. In this era of so called “nepo babies” filling the social media screens and gossip pages, it is important to recognise the positive value of inheriting passion for, and knowledge of, a particular trade and being able, through a collaborative approach and a constant curiosity, to bring that knowledge to bare for those lucky of us to access it.
