If you walk into a department store in Australia and head towards the wayfinding you’ll immediately notice a section entitled Manchester. It’s not a portal to the Northern Quarter or a tribute to Oasis, it’s just towels. It’s because everything made from cotton shipped to early Australian settlers in the 18th and 19th century came from the mills of Manchester – then the industrial capital of textile production.
The goods were so consistently from Manchester that they became known simply as “manchester goods,” which shortened over time to just “manchester.” The city became the product. In the UK we eventually dropped the term, but Australia and New Zealand kept it, and it quietly outlasted the mills, the trade routes, and any living memory of why it made sense.
The label stayed long after the logic left. Someone made their bed in Manchester. Two hundred years later, Australia is still lying in it.
See Justin Moorhouse’s take on it
We tend to picture the shopping mall as a very specific kind of modernism – a mid-century American invention, fluorescent lighting, food courts, and Foot Locker. But the concept of a large, covered, multi-level retail complex is almost exactly 2,000 years old.
Trajan’s Market in Rome, built between 100 and 110 AD, is widely considered the world’s first covered shopping centre. Six storeys, around 150 shops and offices, goods ranging from food and spices to administrative services. It was essentially Westfield, but with better architecture and togas.
The reason this is remarkable isn’t just the age. It’s that the Romans solved retail. They looked at the problem of selling things to a lot of people in a city and arrived at a solution so functional it’s been reinvented ever since, almost identically, across 20 centuries.
Now where’s Caffè Nero.
Around 3,750 years ago, a Mesopotamian merchant named Nanni sent a small clay tablet to a copper trader called Ea-nāṣir. He had ordered copper ingots, sent his servant with the money, and received inferior goods in return. The servant had also been treated rudely in the process. Nanni was not happy about this.
What followed was the world’s oldest known customer complaint. A precisely worded, aggrieved letter inscribed in cuneiform, demanding either proper copper or a full refund, and noting that Ea-nāṣir’s behaviour was frankly not good enough. It was discovered in the ruins of the ancient city of Ur, is now kept in the British Museum, and holds a Guinness World Record. It also turns out Ea-nāṣir had multiple complaint tablets in his house. He was, by all archaeological evidence, a serial complainer.
It seems that the impulse to complain about a purchase that didn’t meet expectations is not a modern phenomenon. It is apparently just a human one.
One star. Copper substandard. Rude service. Would not recommend.
Ea-nāṣir has not responded to this review.
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