Tuesday, April 10, 2007

On your home town turning pikey

On your home town turning pikey

I love pikey* shopping.

Weymouth, lucky for me, is pikey shopping central, with all the main pikey shopping brands in the town centre. We have an Aldi, a Lidl and even a Wilkos that won't stop growing. Good Lord, there's even a Matalan for all your pikey clothes needs, and something called Shoe Zone if your idea of hip, happening fashion goes as far as wearing stuff on your feet. Then we have the Brucie Bonus of dozens of tat shops on the sea front that sell the expected rock, lucky bingo cards and 'Souvenir of Weymouth' sex aids.

If you like shops, and you're a pikey, then the message is clear: come to Weymouth. Cheap parking.

However, as you go further into the town centre, past the frightening looking Dorset Fried Chicken (What's the secret ingredient? Turnips?), where even charity shops fear to tread you eventually reach the bargain basement...

It goes like this: Weymouth has a pikey shop on the main street called The 99p Shop, where everything is 99p.

Recently, another shop opened next door. It is called.... The 98p Shop, and undercuts its neighbour on every single piece of bankrupt stock and useless tat to the tune of one penny.

The shop next door, we note, is empty. Heaven knows what's going to open there. Somebody said it was once a brance of Pound Land, but they couldn't take the competition.

This place is going downhill fast, and we foresee a time, when, right down at the rough end of town, we cross the Pikey Shop event horizon and The Half-a-Farthing Shop will open, selling nothing but dead cats and used sawdust. Two weeks later, another shop will open next door that actually pays you to take away their entire supply of German Army surplus shirts of the kind that only students and hippies wear.

This will, of course, be situated next to the busiest shop in town: Cash Converters, the Bring and Buy Sale of choice for heroin addicts.

Of course, Weymouth is not entirely a pikey-shopper's paradise. We've got a rather large and swanky Debenhams, built over the site of England's first Bubonic Plague graveyard. And boy, do they get loads of free publicity in the Dorset Echo. Nigh on every day there's a 'Drug Addict admits shoplifting from Debenhams' story, which just goes to show that even the terminally stupid and wasted know quality when they see it.

I have put my theory of pikey shopping to several work colleagues and email correspondents, and have come to this conclusion:

"Could be worse. You could live in Didcot. There's a sign over the door that reads 'Warning: May contain traces of nutter'."

Which is fair enough, to be honest.

* I know what you're thinking: "The Duck's turned racist again". Pikey in this instance is more-or-less interchangable with the term "chav". You know the kind of person, so whatchoo lookin' at you cahnt?

No comments: