Guardian UK Writer Slams After-Christmas Sales as Pointless

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Love shopping the after-Christmas sales? Excited about scoring great buys and saving loads of cash? Well, Guardian scribe Tanya Gold thinks you're a fool—and possible deranged. "Asking sales shoppers why they are shopping is like asking alcoholics why they drink," she says. "Incapable of evaluating their own behaviour, they reply only in babble: "I want to treat myself." They are temporarily deranged, and their testimony is not to be trusted." More from Gold:

I go to the sales every year and I am always surprised by how pointless the goods are, although I shouldn't be, because I suck down the advertising like everyone else. I would not mind buying, in that old wife's cliche, something of good quality that lasts for ever—a gravestone perhaps? But that is not the point of this junk. It is sort of fashion anti-matter—clothes that do not warm, shoes you cannot walk in, and handbags too heavy to carry.

Selfridges, for instance, is stocking a high-heeled trainer. I forget the price, but this object is utterly useless, and it happily screams its uselessness, as if the design house marketing monkeys are laughing at us, which they probably are. If I could persuade a consumer to sleep outside my shop in a sleeping bag, so they could buy a £665 handbag named after a penniless vagrant (down from £950!), I would laugh too. The shops, of course, claim that advertising is neutral. If that is so, why do they spend so much money on it? To make the Mulberry Alexa Hobo Plum Loopy Leopard Quilted Denim handbag feel good about itself?