This Side of the Pond

This week’s story begins with an article in my hometown’s local newspaper. It won’t come across as particularly explosive, so I’ll get you up to speed in one sentence and you’ll see why it matters later: a supermarket chain, which has been cutting jobs for a while so is clearly not in the best of financial health, bought one of the most recognizable retail chains in Britain in 2016, and has just cut hundreds more.

I know, it’s bad news but also terribly boring. I wouldn’t have gobbled down every word either, if the story hadn’t been about Argos.

Ah, Argos, shop of possibilities, destination for emergency appliance purchases, one-stop shop for Christmas planning. The laminated book of dreams, as one of my favorite comedians put it. Argos is unlike anything else I have seen, anywhere else in the world.

I think you guys would enjoy shopping there, because the store itself was inspired by a trip to America. The gentleman who invented it back in 1973 had been invited over here to witness the phenomenon of catalog shopping – and thus was birthed an empire.

I know for a fact that a lot of us still furtively browse catalogs in this age of online ordering. There’s something about a magazine full of potential, even the dodgy ones where the stock ranges from tacky dolls and jewelry that turns your skin green to sweaters you wouldn’t put on the dog.

Even then, we can’t help ourselves. When presented with a catalog, we turn those pages with trembling fingers and dream of what we could do with all the exciting toys.

Now imagine one of those magazines was the size and weight of a small car (1600 pages in the Argos catalog these days, apparently) and you could just say the word and whichever item caught your fancy would materialize in front of you that instant. This is the concept behind Argos.

At last count, it was estimated that 18 million households across Britain keep an Argos catalog at home (out of a total of 27.6 million households, so that’s two thirds of us prepared for emergency garden tool replacement). Meanwhile, 96 percent of the population is never more than ten miles from a store.

Sorry, not store – at Argos, they call it a showroom. This is because you can’t walk into an Argos and see any of the items on sale, just a room filled with bound and laminated versions of the catalog.

An Argos experience usually begins when a household item stages a dramatic death – a vacuum sucks up most of the carpet, for instance, or your kettle explodes. Or, in my husband’s first experience of Argos, the top half of a chair inexplicably falls off the bottom half and you suddenly have nowhere to sit. At that moment, a voice at the back of your head will reassure you that Argos has this covered.

Enter the home of the laminated book of dreams, make your way to a desk and browse to your heart’s content, assuming you didn’t arrive fully prepared to make your choice. You will be pleased to see that the available items, especially the “own brands”, are cheaper than you would find elsewhere; so thrifty, in fact, that you will be ruined for appliance shopping in normal stores for the rest of your natural life.

Once you find your ideal toaster within the selection of toasters detailed on the toaster pages, write down its number on the small piece of paper provided, using the even smaller pen. It will look like the ones you used to get in some banks, only not on the end of a chain.

There should be at least one nearby, although you might need to go treasure hunting. It’s not difficult for someone who needs to restock their stationery drawer to wander off with a handful.

If you want to check your toaster is available, no problem – there’s a handy machine by the desk into which you can type the same code. It will reward you with an estimate of stock.

(Alternatively, it will announce there’s only one in the warehouse, which will immediately cause you to suspect every other human in the store of coveting the only toaster that could possibly work in your kitchen, even though you only found out about it three minutes ago and it’s virtually identical to six other toasters on the page).

Clutch your piece of paper and approach one of the catalog fairies at the checkout. They look like normal human beings, but they can’t be, because they’re about to perform magic.

The catalog fairy will request payment. After biting your coin to check its metal, they will whisper arcane words and wave you away while the spell takes hold.

A contraption that resembles a lazy butler but is actually a wizard’s cabinet will whir into life behind the counter. It will rumble to a crescendo and the door will open, revealing your toaster inside.

Nobody knows where your toaster came from. None have ever seen what lies below the floor of an Argos showroom, we know only that the retail goblins go to work at our behest, if the coin is good.

From the pages of a book, the appliance you needed has materialized from thin air. It’s sort of like shopping online, only it doesn’t require an internet connection and you still have to drive to the store.

It’s brilliant in an emergency, but Argos has other uses. As you can imagine, I have never known a time when making your Christmas list didn’t involve flicking through the Argos catalog with a marker pen. You can always trust the goblins to give you ideas.

They’ve made changes to the Argos system over the years, but none have really stuck. They’ve tried offering online payment and opening bigger stores, but we’re not interested. We just want to write numbers on scraps of paper and watch things appear out of nowhere.

This is why the article worried me: I’m aghast they might be sacking some of the goblins. It didn’t seem earth-shattering, before you knew what Argos was, but now you see the horrific possibilities. If we allow the goblins to disappear from the British shopping experience, it really will be the day that magic dies.