Prime Trash. (Primark)

Member Name: SweetBerryJam

Product:	Primark
Date:	11/11/09 (75 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, up to date fashion.

Disadvantages: Poor quality, child labour accusations, pandemonium in store!

Primark (or Primani as many people know it) is a mecca for broke yet fashionable young whippersnappers and penny-pinching old grandma's alike. For those unfamiliar with it, Primark is a high street retailer of clothing and homewares which is aimed solely at the budget market, with few things hitting the over-£20 mark. A standard teeshirt will only cost you four quid. A jumper will be about £8. A pair of knickers under £1. You get the gist.

For the sake of those of you who have read the other 400+ other Primark reviews, I won't list every department and every item sold in Primark. Instead, I'll list the things I like about it, and then, the things about Primark which are bl**dy terrible.

First, the good things:

1. The up to date fashion.
Primark has a MASSIVE range of clothing, and their styles are becoming more and more on trend. They are now a serious contender to Topshop in the fashion stakes in terms of young women's clothes, with the added benefit of being a fraction of the price. The first time Primark was considered a true contender to more expensive high-street stores was when they introduced their sequinned shrug in Christmas 2006, and it sold out instantly and waiting lists had to be created for a £10 item of clothing! Recent examples of this include the Primark Atmosphere shiny leggings which universally sold out when they were originally released in late 2008. Although certain items like Primark dresses, skirts and leggings are highly desirable, other items such as their coats and their jewellery are not quite as on-trend.

2. The prices
As mentioned previously, Primark really does have rock-bottom prices, although in recent times there has been a bit of a hike in their prices, particularly for key pieces like dresses and heels. A pair of plain flat ballet pumps will still only cost you £4, which is so cheap, you don't mind if (or should I say when) they fall apart. Generally a 'big shop' at Primark will never cost more than £60, which is absurd when you think of how much it would cost to buy the same amount of clothing at TopShop or Miss Selfridge.

3. The sizes.
One of the few other things decent about Primark is their range of sizes. I have only ever had a couple of instances in there where my size was not available - generally, they tend not to sell out of sizes. This may be due to the MASSIVE amount of stock they buy in (which often ends up trampled underfoot by eager shoppers), but it is commendable. In Topshop I regularly have problems finding a size 8, but rarely in primark.

4. Homewares and soft furnishings.
Primark sells a number of things for the home, ranging from cushions and bedsheets to vases and wall prints. They do a decent range of budget bedding, including really cheap pillows and duvets, which are great for students like me. Also they have some really quite pretty duvet covers, which are pretty cheap and look far more expensive than they are.

Now, the bad things:

1. The price.
Primark have been pulled up on their unethical trading, way way before the chain exploded with popularity around 2006. Accusations of slave labour arose which caused Primark to get rid of a number of its suppliers from Asia, but still the store remains tarred by the notion that exploitation and unethical trading must be occurring in order to sell the clothes so cheaply. Rumours abound of employees in sweatshops working to produce our £4 teeshirts are being paid the equivalent of 7p an hour and working up to 80 hour weeks. As with Nike and Gap before them, Primark have promised to reassess their worker conditions and strive to improve the rates of pay for overseas workers, but really, how much do consumers care about it? Not enough to stop buying, as has been proven by the continual growth of the chain.

2. The queues and general mayhem instore.
Most Primark stores suffer with the same problem - bulging clothes racks with items ready to fall off en masse at the slightest touch, women running round madly swinging the large blue shopping baskets and risking having your eye out with errant coat hangers, and of course a myriad extremely fed up looking staff, with an equally fed-up looking queue patiently shuffling past them. Primark is just TOO popular, and shopping there has become a painful, arduous experience, in which you struggle to find the item you want under a pile of other cr*p, and then you struggle to the changing room, at which point you have to endure an impossibly long queue, before trying things on in an intolerably dirty changing room (usually containing the last occupant's Gregg's wrapper, along with all the clothes they decided not to buy), and then the ultimate agony, you must join the queue for the till, or as I call it, the long slow death by consumerism.

3. The terrible quality
It seems wrong to complain about Primark quality, considering the old adage 'You get what you pay for'. If you are paying a tenner for a dress, you know it is too good to be true, and it always (without fail in the case of Primark) is. I have had skirt seams which have split under very slight pressure the first time of wearing, buttons which have fallen off a brand new coat, tops that have ended up misshapen after one wash, jewellery which the stones have fallen out of, shoes which have developed holes the second I wear them in the rain - the list goes on. What should be remembered though is that items from other stores often frequently are of poor quality too - particularly Topshop. Quality is not ASSURED by a high price, therefore poor quality at a low price is in some way a reassurance!

4. The underwear
Ugh. Shiny pink and black lace bras. Lime green boyshorts. 100% synthetic materials. The very idea of Primark knickers makes my skin crawl.

5. The men's clothing.
I don't buy menswear in Primark, but generally it seems to be a low budget version of Burtons. Tacky slogans on teeshirts, ill fitting trousers and tasteless bleached denim. If you are male, I suggest you stay far away!

6. The ubiquity.
Primark is EVERYWHERE. In 2008 a store opened in my home town of Redditch. Primark has completely changed the place - everyone is suddenly desperately fashionable, and everywhere you look there are people, young and old, lugging huge brown paper bags full of cheap spoils. There are no large towns or cities that are safe from the Primark disease. I think my problem with this is the lack of a true challenge to their bargain-basement monopoly. There are cheap clothing shops (Peacocks, for instance) but few are as up to the minute in terms of fashion, and the same goes for cut price shoe shops like Deuchmann Shoes and Shoe zone. Primark still reigns supreme as a store that is INFAMOUSLY and unashamably cheap.

Inherently, the final point is my main problem with Primark. If they can do it so cheap, why don't other retailers follow? Or at least exhibit some transparent work practices that expose Primark for the exploitative business it is. It doesn't seem right that, in the current 'credit-crunch' furore, one store is benefiting so extensively.

(Review also posted on Ciao.com under the same name)

Summary: Cheap and nasty... but still pretty cool, unfortunately!