Mary Portas: It’s Great Westfield are Paying Me to Say It’s Great

So the great consumer debt temple Westfields has opened, and the verdict from the BBC and the Telegraph is it’s super fab!

That is, according to Westfield consultant and TV Queen of Shops Mary Portas, who everyone has been turning to for some ‘objective’ cleb analysis of 2008’s great white elephant.

“Westfield is something people really need at the moment. If I open another paper or listen to another radio programme full of doom and gloom, I’m going to put my head in a gas oven… I think Westfield is tremendous,” writes Portas in today’s Telegraph.

Of course. Whenever I’m feeling down, have no money, no line of credit, all my little boom market trinkets (car, house, marriage) are being reposessed, the future looking grim etc., I don’t want to reflect on what’s happened and think about readjusting my values somewhat, you know, maybe dropping the whole ‘consumption is my religion’ shtick… no no no, I want to turn up the volume a bit, consume more and faster faster…

On the BBC, they didn’t even have the decency to refer to Portas as ‘Westfield mouthpiece’, instead opting to introduce her as ‘retail guru’.

“Watching the Australians develop this has actually been quite an artform…,” she harps.

Just like, say, watching an orchestrated PR campaign swallowed whole by major news organisations?…

“I think people just want a bit of joy, and somewhere with a buzz and an energy, and if they turn up today and get that feeling, then actually that’s what shopping should be about.”

UPDATE: Just had a look at today’s Guardian and it appears not everyone is as charmed by the supposed joy-generator. Polly Toynbee walks around the centre in a dazed stupor: “It’s more Gatwick village than Liberty, all airport ambience and airlessness, an everywhere and nowhere place, everytown and no town, every familiar shop in every high street, the same, same, same”. That’s better! The endless footfall of the credit-addled consumer rendered in a trudging verbal tempo! Someone show it to Portas and tip her into gas-oven suicide, please.

Posted by Becky North in Other | October 31, 2008 1:42PM |