For spendthrifts like me, there'll always be a Pryce

Hello everyone. My name's James, and I'm a shopaholic.

The main source of my addiction is Taobao, China's massive online shopping platform — a repository for everything from money guns to fake muscles, and everything in between. Its offerings are so varied and its vendors so diverse, it makes Amazon look like a corner shop.

My particular vice is mostly guitars and their associated paraphernalia and, much to my girlfriend's chagrin, knock-off football shirts. Our wardrobe has a shelf stuffed full of them, many of which my post-pandemic proportions will no longer allow me to squeeze into. It drives her mad.

During the first two weeks of the recent Women's World Cup, I procured no fewer than four different China shirts to wear while supporting the Steel Roses (there was a hope I would get to wear one in the round of 16, but that was sadly not to be).

What's worse is that the app's very clever algorithms track what I browse, so every time I open it on my phone, I am greeted by a smorgasbord of delights tempting me to dip deeper into my digital wallet.

Sometimes, I don't even have to open the app. Regular notifications will pop up on my phone's lock screen, reminding me that the latest replica Wrexham AFC kit, that "vintage" Van Halen T-shirt or Fender Custom Shop Stratocaster I was coveting the day before, are still available to purchase with just a tap of my finger.

The game doesn't stop there, either. Once you've made your decision to make the purchase and get that dopamine hit, there's the wait.

The notification of the order being prepped for shipping gives your heart a little skip. Then there's another little rush of endorphins when the courier picks it up. It becomes almost agonizing to watch the little truck icon traverse the (usually) thousands of kilometers across the country, slowly edging its way up the map to Beijing. That changes again when the app tells you it's on the delivery bike, and the same excitement as a kid on Christmas morning takes hold as you wait for the knock at the door. Much like a puppy waiting for its master to return home from work.

The packaging is eagerly removed, triggering another hormonal hit of happiness, before, an hour later, the buyer's remorse kicks in. To make yourself feel better, you start scrolling the app once more and the cycle starts all over again.

I could blame my addiction on Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, Taobao's parent company, or point an accusatory finger at Liu Qiangdong, founder of JD, a similarly addictive domestic shopping app. I could even curse Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who, arguably, started all this e-commerce malarkey.

"Surely, James," I hear you ask, "instead of picking on poor billionaires, you should take responsibility for your own impulses and lack of willpower?"

Well, no. Instead, and with no small sense of national pride, I foist the blame squarely onto one of my countrymen: the late, and aptly-named, Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones, the Welsh entrepreneur who invented the whole "shopping without leaving your sofa" thing.

His customers, who included Florence Nightingale and Queen Victoria, would order by post and the goods would then be delivered by railway — which, I suppose, would also involve an early form of order "tracking", as the UK train timetables were, I imagine, pretty accurate back then.

Without his first, pioneering mail-order catalog, published in 1861, which consisted solely of woolen goods, what is now a global five trillion-dollar industry, with its convenient, easily navigable way of regularly parting fools like me from their money, may never have existed. At least, not as we know it today.

Incidentally, Pryce-Jones is also credited with inventing the sleeping bag (patented under the name the Euklisia Rug) — which, coincidentally, is yet another thing I've bought from Taobao that has never been used and now just collects dust in some dark corner of my apartment.