Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Let’s chortle at the poor – with the same article twice

Jan Moir has written a hilarious* article in the Daily Mail about... guffaw**... people shopping in Poundland!

Yes, it's 'let's chortle at the poor' - a veritable spectator sport when you're a screeching Mail writer snob who likes chuckling at people who can't afford to shop in M&S every lunchtime and who have to watch the pennies. You know, poor people, those dirty bastards who, you imagine, still have billions of pounds of taxpayer-spent benefits to spend on cheap cigarettes and booze; or even people who weren't poor but have been made recently redundant. What fun***! What hilarity! What an incredibly delicious wheeze****!

Jan snorts:

There is a floating frog pondlight that is as far from a Wow Deal! as imaginable and something that I thought were Star Wars light sabres, but are actually plastic solar lights. I'm not the only shopper to be confused by them.
'Solar lights? Wot for? For night-time?' one woman asks another.
'No, they are for day.' 'Why do you need a light in your garden in the daytime?'
'Well, you can only use them if you are in a sunny country, anyway.'

Do you like the 'wot' as if to emphasise the common-ness of the person in Poundland? Tee hee:

Now look. Of course, Gordon [Ramsay] and Rupert [Everett] are not actually here in person. They are lurking in the ultimate celebrity graveyard that is Poundland's DVD section, alongside offerings from The Professionals, the Teletubbies (so over) and something called Masters Of Angling with Bob Nudd.
Nearby is a strange range of Walkers potato snacks called French Fries. Who eats them?

Umm, people who like crisps? Who the fuck do you think?

The real crime though, as I'm certainly not the first to point out (Hat-tip to Adam Bienkov) is that this isn't even the first time the Mail has done this exact fucking story this year. They did it previously back in January, when Petronella Wyatt went meandering around the shelves and passing cold judgment on the lower-class types who might shop there:

The shop assistant in Poundland is becoming increasingly dyspeptic. In fact, I'm concerned he might just turn round and hit me. I am in the store's Enfield branch in North London and I have just asked him to show me where the Chanel shoes are.
'We don't stock anything from the Channel Islands,' he says irately. 'But we've got some mints from Indonesia.' I protest I can't wear a mint.
'All right then,' he replies, his face becoming rosier. 'We've got a feather boa section over there.'

Oh fuck off. Ooh, where are the Chanel shoes? In the fucking Chanel shoe shop you supercilious piece of shit. As I said at the time, violent class war wouldn't be entirely a bad thing if it meant that articles like that never appeared in the papers ever again.

But essentially, just the same story again. The same posh cunt being photographed frowning at the horrible experience of having to mix with people who don't have butlers; the same drivel; the same lack of imagination; the same sneering balls. I'm sure the same jollity will come back yet again at Christmastime when some other snotty fuckwit gets to tell us the horrors of having to swap Harvey Nicks for Poundland for buying Xmas pressies... oh just fuck off and die. Seriously. Just die.

Back to Jan Moir:

Is there anything good here? A friend swears by the dogpoo bags, which are apparently the middle-class poop-removal item of choice. 'A hundred for a quid,' he told me. 'You can't go wrong. Although it's a bit embarrassing if you bump into the neighbours in there.'

No, I'd find it embarrassing if I bumped into Jan Moir in there. I'd find it embarrassing to share the same few square feet on the planet as her while I was shopping for bargains in Poundland. It's embarrassing enough being the same species as it is. Christ.

* By 'hilarious' I mean 'fucking not funny in the slightest'
** By 'guffaw' I mean 'bang your head on the desk repeatedly, as the tears of despair turn into manic laughter, at the pointlessness of it all'
*** By 'fun' I mean 'tedious repetitive wank and thinly veiled class prejudice'
**** By 'incredibly delicious wheeze' I mean 'annoyingly predictable same old space-filling shit which for some reason gives real money to an annoying twerp who couldn't write anything even slightly interesting if their children's lives depended on it'

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