My interviewee is explaining Costco’s appeal. It’s convenient: everything is in one place, and since you have to buy in bulk, you don’t need to come often (the store is meant to supply small businesses, though everyone I talk to here is shopping for personal consumption). Then there are the deals: even for electronics, it often has the best prices and warranties. It all sounds like a perfect exercise in prudence, getting the most out of your time and money. Except, did he really mean to buy all of this? Does he really need quite so much salmon? “That is the drawback,” the man says ruefully. “You see things as you walk around, and you end up spending a lot. I came here just to buy some chicken, some meat, and I’ve just spent £360.” I point to a pair of olive-green chinos recently added to the trunk. “They’re nice,” he objects. “I thought I could wear them for work.”

It is not the only time I will hear such a tale of accidental indulgence. In fact, it almost becomes a running joke during my afternoon at Costco. Everyone says they are here to save money, before acknowledging that they treated themselves to something they couldn’t resist. “The problem is you get carried away,” says an elderly woman who comes with her neighbor to stock up. A builder eating pizza in his van tells me, as though I’m an idiot for asking, “it’s cheaper. You buy in bulk.” Then I raise the matter of spontaneous purchases, and he goes quiet. “Yeah, that does happen,” his friend chimes in. One man who complained of being broke was nonetheless leaving with a liter of Jack Daniels and a crate of Nigerian Guinness. These were, he assures me, excellent value for money.

Costco has, it seems, cracked the secret of selling to a population which is increasingly concerned with belt-tightening, as living standards are ground down by taxes and inflation. It lures people in with the prospect of cheap stuff in large quantities, and then overwhelms them with temptation. And frankly, there is such insane abundance here that I struggle to believe anyone could avoid this trap. Fancy three liters of vodka in a glass skull? Australian abalones? A “giant treat tower” comprising “3kg of festive treats”? And while you’re here, what about a 10-player poker table, or an oriental rug?

Everything about Costco is big: the stores, the products, and the money. It is currently the third-largest retailer in the world by revenue, behind only Walmart and Amazon. Much of its success comes from its membership model, whereby you pay £42 annually to access its stores (or £30 if you run a business), allowing it to operate with smaller margins on its products. The company came to Britain in 1993, a decade after it first opened in the United States, and has been steadily expanding since. Long ago, when my parents first got hooked, they made pilgrimages to Costco in Watford two or three times a year, but with each decade another branch has opened closer to home. There are currently 29 stores in Britain, and more than a dozen new ones at various stages of planning and construction. Last year, Costco managed sales worth £5.3 billion in the UK, almost double its turnover in 2019.

Croydon offers some insight into this success. Occupying a liminal zone where London bleeds into Surrey, people of every conceivable class and background live or work around here, from gilet-wearing rugby dads to African Muslims, from civil servants to white-van men. And despite the fact that Costco officially restricts its memberships to individuals from certain occupations, I found virtually all of these groups shopping there.

It is safe to say that few people approach this place on foot — one can only carry so many five-kilo blocks of cheddar — but doing so is revealing, if you want to see the hinterlands where retail is migrating. The Croydon Costco, a rectangular fortress, is nestled among acres of dual carriageway and brick warehouses, school sports fields and self-storage facilities. Around the corner is the surreal Grand Sapphire “Hotel and Banqueting” venue, essentially a Travelodge with lots of neoclassical columns and pediments tacked onto it. This masterpiece of banality, I later learn, was due to host a Reform UK Christmas party, but pulled out after a campaign of complaints.

We are a long way from the reassuringly suburban forms of the Tesco, Asda or Marks & Spencer superstore, with their gabled roofs and detailed taxonomy of class signifiers (cheese and onion or cheddar and chive?). These remain a familiar setting for British life, but their position is being steadily eroded by the rise of warehouse shopping. Whereas the traditional supermarkets still gesture towards the ideal of the friendly local community of shops (which they in reality replaced), hiding their brutal efficiency behind a chatty marketing style and an emphasis on British produce, their challengers cut the frills and let the prices speak for themselves. Ikea’s giant edge-of-town warehouse-stores were pioneering in this regard, teaching the middle classes to swallow their pretenses for the sake of a bargain. Lidl and Aldi brought the warehouse onto the high street, their chintzy copycat branding made more palatable by the ravages of inflation. With Costco, the trend approaches its zenith. Retail collapses into logistics and infrastructure; architecturally, Costco stores are cousins of the data center and the Amazon fulfillment hub.

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Look at the trolleys leaving Costco and you will see plenty of evidence of our straightened economic times. The company’s obvious audience in Britain are the comfortable but concerned; natural denizens of the M&S food hall who have been driven in search of bargains by the high cost of everything, and who have the current account balance and the cupboard space to buy several months’ worth of cashew nuts at once. According to market researchers, high earners are more likely to shop at Costco. But most of the shoppers I see at the Croydon store are not in this category. Unlike that gentleman with the green chinos, they cannot spend several hundred pounds on a whim. Rather, many have come to stock up on a small number of products — one family appears to be living off Yazoo milkshakes and tins of baked beans — even if they pick up a few treats along the way. The most common items appear to be toilet paper, laundry detergent, and above all, crates of bottled drinking water. (The people of South London, it seems, do not trust what comes out of their taps. I’m not sure why, though one young woman, a nurse, describes herself as “prone to typhoid”.) No doubt some Costco members like the idea that they have hacked grocery shopping by going wholesale.

Still, we have by no means entered an era of Gradgrindian retail, where enjoyment counts for nothing and all that matters are the numbers on the sticker. At Costco, the sheer volume and variety of products creates its own kind of pornographic spectacle, which is only heightened by the lack of ceremony. Add some promotional giveaways and an in-store canteen, and you get something like an experience. I have barely arrived when I find myself looking at a case of diamond jewelry — placed near the door, along with the fancy perfumes, for Christmas — trying not to think about what I paid for my wife’s engagement ring. Moments later, I am sampling coffee from a ludicrously discounted espresso machine, joking with two ladies in headscarves and their trolley full of young infants. With the aisles stretching ahead of us, there is a sense of anticipation almost like the start of a big night out. I later manage to sample a steak, a chicken Kiev, and a tot of Panamanian rum. I wasn’t planning on buying anything, but by the time I reach the vats of olive oil my resistance is broken and I fetch a trolley.

After 45 minutes in the store, my theory of Costco has changed. I no longer think that people are being seduced into spending more than they wanted to; I suspect that, on some level, they come here to be seduced. The genius of warehouse retail is that it makes shoppers feel like they are behaving as purely rational economic agents, which seems like the responsible way to act when money is scarce. In truth, they are engaging in a kind of leisure, enjoying the chance to browse, fantasize, and buy things that they believe they probably shouldn’t. This is not without social and political significance. It suggests that, for all the manifest anger and unhappiness at our system today, a major plank of capitalist society — the desire to possess and to enjoy commodities — remains firmly in place. On the evidence of Croydon, American-style supersized consumerism is probably a more unifying cultural force in modern Britain than the vague British values which people are always trying to formulate.

Leaving the store, I join a chaotic queue of trolleys as it converges on a handful of overworked cashiers, frantically sifting through the mountains of goods with their barcode scanners. My turn comes and it turns out I’ve managed to spend £100. I check my receipt in disbelief, convinced there is a mistake. Is this actually saving me money? Probably not. Do I regret it? Not really.

Maggie Bullock, author of The Kingdom of Prep, on the other hand, went all-in on style after she left the American South to attend boarding school. In her book, which covers “the rise and fall of J.Crew”, she examines the history of the company that enabled her to quickly dress in the preppy style of her classmates: flat-front trousers, polo shirts, roll-neck sweaters. A well-worn roll-neck sweater, Bullock writes with nostalgic affection, “had social acceptance knit into its very fibres”.

Like America, J.Crew sold a paradoxical dream: the top tier of society is exclusive, but anyone can reach it. Its products aped those of Ralph Lauren, Brooks Brothers, and J.Press — whose name J.Crew emulated — but retailed for a fraction of the cost. The clothes were still pricey, but could be thought of as an affordable investment; the company was aspirational, certainly, but it wasn’t exclusionary. That is, unless you happened to be a woman who wore a size larger than 12 or a man who wore “XXL” shirts, although the company redressed its skinny-bias in the more obese world of the 2010s.

Indeed, what J.Crew was selling evolved in tandem with American society. At its point of inception, in 1983, clothing retailers played a critical role in the capital-powered construction of self. And J.Crew offered a ready-to-wear identity: a beginner’s guide to prep for those who quickly needed to ingratiate themselves to the establishment. Initially, the company was catalogue-only, but during the late Eighties, founder Arthur Cinader’s daughter Emily steered its expansion into the indoor mall — the place of American identity creation during this period. Being able to buy the prep look straight from a catalogue had been an innovation, but taking it to the mall, where you could browse identities between stops at the food court and the arcade, was a critical next step in expanding J.Crew’s reach.  

But the early 2000s saw the beginning of the end of the American indoor mall — with many older malls built in the Seventies and Eighties being abandoned — and so, too, the decline of this iteration of J.Crew. As the company struggled with its identity, young consumers turned elsewhere, particularly to Abercrombie & Fitch. In 2002, I was hired to manage an A&F store at the Streets of Southpoint Mall — one of the elaborate, indoor-outdoor mega-malls that appeared during this period of rapid mall consolidation. At the time, A&F was doubling down on a truly exclusionary aesthetic, marketing clothes solely to people hot enough to wear them. Only a very particular kind of cool young person belonged in our clothes; I was exhorted not to hire anyone who didn’t fit the bill. (When the tide turned, a swarm of online identities — pro-social justice, pro-size acceptance — made A&F something of a punchline.)

The American Dream is a constant quest for an identity that is both recognisable and exceptional, and the divergent paths of J.Crew and A&F expose this seesaw between inclusivity and exclusivity. The Ronald Reagan-overseen Eighties, the true heyday of J.Crew, still held the promise of upward mobility and material success for all. Everyone was invited. Meanwhile, the 2000s were a time of economic retrenchment, eventually leading to the major recession of 2008. The elite felt threatened, and needed to differentiate itself, even superficially, through something like the vision A&F was selling. The effect of economics on the identity of Americans played out through off-the-rack fashion; it seems as if Americans are forever in high school, anxiously buying new looks to fit in with whichever lunch table they find themselves sitting at. This never-ending quest for identity and belonging speaks to a deep-seated, uncomfortable need to navigate the complexities of American society, where class, race, and personal identity intertwine and continuously evolve.

This incessant buying and selling of the product-mediated self fascinated me long before I entered a high school refectory. It probably began with my father, who wore the same half-dozen ill-fitting Brooks Brothers Number One Sack Suits all through his four-decade career as a car dealer. He considered anyone who linked their identity to branded material goods — whether Ford, Chrysler or J.Crew garments — to be susceptible to manipulation by the rapacious, advertising-driven economy. What he sold were ephemeral dreams: were you a Chevy man, an Oldsmobile man, a Cadillac man? The answer didn’t matter to him — they were all quick-to-depreciate “hunks of junk” — but it was this question that could motivate uncertain people to fork out their life savings. Everyone in America wants to be someone else, someone different and better; we can be easily convinced to invest hard-earned money in ourselves.

J.Crew experienced a revival in the mid-2000s and 2010s, when it became the preferred clothing brand for Barack and Michelle Obama. It had managed to successfully blend its old Ivy League staples with hipster trends, but this was J.Crew’s last big money: where could identity formation go in post-racial, post-class, post-patriarchy America? The answer, we would eventually learn, was online, where the process of branded self-differentiation was able to remain in dizzying flux.

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I never imagined — and neither, apparently, did the executives at J.Crew and A&F, even as their billion-dollar brands began to struggle — that high-quality clothing would cease to play such a fundamental role in defining a person. The internet introduced a thousand new ways to form an identity, with Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok allowing users to continuously evolve. Some retail companies kept up, at first. Fast fashion companies such as Zara and H&M fuelled a retail apocalypse by churning out new wearable identities in response to viral articles and much-liked Instagram posts. By the end of the 2010s, if a certain influencer was wearing a particular designer shirt, Zara could have a cheap equivalent in its stores a week later.

But eventually, material possessions like clothing became less important in shaping identity, as digital profiles and online avatars took centre-stage — especially with the advent of lockdowns, Zoom meetings and fully remote existences. In this world, upon encountering someone else’s identity marker, the desire to adopt it as part of one’s own “personal brand” could be instantaneously satisfied; adding pronouns to one’s online “bio” is even faster than Amazon Prime. Even the speediest fast fashion purveyor can’t construct you an identity as quickly as a few mouse clicks or carefully angled selfies.

And material products are vulnerable. They rip, and tear and shrink in the wash. Pronouns endure, until the split second you decide to change them. The countless “skins” that can be purchased for your League of Legends characters won’t fade, but can be easily swapped on or off. Each signifies something supposedly unique about the skin buyer, who might have spent hundreds of dollars on these trifles. Pronouns are free but increasingly, in the virtual world, as in the material one, identity is for sale. And clothing companies like J.Crew and A&F cannot compete. While a garment may convey a message, its impact is limited, compared to a video of your freshly-filtered face that gets thousands of likes, or an announcement of your new pronouns that is met with widespread yet ephemeral approval.

Our pursuit of branded identities is a curious one: we are seeking uniqueness in the context of comfortable conformity, looking for the “right stuff” to distinguish us enough to join the clique of our choice. By providing affordable, aspirational style, J.Crew may have democratised fashion to some extent, but even when worn by the Obamas, it also subtly reinforced the class distinctions that are so deeply ingrained in American society. The wearers we are seeking to emulate are, in turn, seeking to appear more like us. But they are in fact part of an American upper class whose true markers of distinctions are subtle or deliberately obscure. A&F, at least, was frank about the existence of an obscure qualification to enter the elite that some will never attain. But online, it’s easy to forget that the carefully-curated versions of ourselves are often amplifying social divisions, pre-existing biases and class structures — rather than challenging them.

What the story of J.Crew teaches us is that our constructed styles, and by extension our constructed selves, are always on the way out. Their expiration dates are getting closer, and the periods of planned obsolescence shorter. The time-limited high school experience serves as an apt metaphor. Individuals strive for both self-expression and acceptance by conforming to an accepted aesthetic, and hundreds of high school movies have ended with characters achieving this tightrope walk. But in reality, it’s impossible to simultaneously break out as a unique individual and be accepted by the masses for adhering to a specific set of rules. Ultimately, our continuous reinvention of style highlights the fact that social politics always reduces, as in high school, to perpetual insecurity.