Joke is on us if we let much-loved high street stores close

The family-run firm will continue as an online store offering costumes, magic tricks and everything required to carry out classic pranks and practical jokes, such as whoopee cushions, fart whistles and snappy chewing gum.

A large proportion of those posting their dismay on Twitter/X shared the same specific fond memory of buying fake turds with their pocket money, and it occurs to me that Tam Shepherds must have been the source of the plastic poo that was neatly stored in my grandparents’ hall bureau.

As with every sad closure, you have to wonder how many of those who were once customers stepped foot in the store in recent years or even decades. Outside of the busy Halloween season, how many made plans to visit with their children or grandchildren, and indeed how appealing are traditional hi-jinks when TikTok streamers are staging “pranks” (often very cruel ones) for global audiences of millions?

Tam Shepherds in 1972 (Image: Archive)

The family who run Tam Shepherds cited uncertainty over a redevelopment in Queen Street – which will include retail space but mainly comprise (yet more) student flats, a cinema, gym and games lounge – and the “high costs of being a small independent shop in the city centre” as reasons for the closure.

Four years ago another Glasgow costume shop, Arty Party at St George’s Cross, shut it doors amid ongoing Covid-19 restrictions.

Considering the competition, it’s amazing Tam Shepherds kept going for as long as it did. As a young child in Edinburgh I made regular visits to the treasure trove Aha Ha Ha in the Grassmarket but was obsessed with Joke Shop By Post, a mail-order company offering all kinds of dubious substances including burp powder, laxative tea bags, volcanic sugar and soap sweets. I imagine these days one can be excluded from school for attempting to poison or humiliate one’s peers, but back then it was all good clean fun.

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The company proudly declared in their hand-drawn catalogue that their fake cat sick was “made in our own factory”, which some research reveals was a denture repair laboratory in Bristol run by a man called Andrew Mulcahy, who began his mail-order side hustle after reading a book called The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.

Compared to many of today’s online hustlers, Mulcahy definitely does not qualify as lazy.

He graduated from making fake cat sick to developing and manufacturing magic tricks for the current incarnation of the business, Magic By Post, and his website boasts that the firm sends out 97% of orders within 24 hours and “we don’t drop ship”, referring to the now-common practice of outsourcing fulfilment – the stocking, packing, shipping and delivering products – to a third party.

Warnings about dropshipping have become commonplace on X, giving the impression that the practice is essentially a scam, but the other major social media platforms have not yet followed suit, perhaps because they would be doing themselves out of too much advertising business.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the practice of promoting and selling products that aren’t in your possession – for example, an artist may sell prints of their work that are printed and dispatched by a third party – and if applying a hefty mark-up to something mass-produced in China is to be flagged as dubious behaviour then we’d need to have content notes attached to adverts for almost every piece of plastic we buy, whether in store or online.

We have a responsibility as consumers to consider whether the product we are buying seems too good to be true for the price, and deep down we know that anything sold on Shein, Temu or AliExpress likely falls into that category. It’s a case of buyer beware, as there may be little recourse if the product is defective or just wildly different from what was advertised. We also know that sellers on these sites steal images from other companies and from independent designers and makers, then send customers laughable knocks-offs.

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In a farcical twist, Shein is in the process of suing Temu, claiming its business model depends on “encouraging its sellers to infringe the intellectual property rights of others and sell counterfeit or sub-standard goods”.

In response, Temu accuses them of “unbelievable audacity”, saying that “Shein, buried under its own mountain of intellectual property lawsuits, has the nerve to fabricate accusations against others for the very misconduct they’re repeatedly sued for.”

Some may shrug and say it’s for the courts to settle these wrangles and that they’ve been happy with their own online shopping experiences. But there’s an opportunity cost here – we will lose more honest UK firms if people keep shopping with unethical mega-platforms just to save a few pounds.

And with the loss of shops like Tam Shepherds we lose something else that’s hard to quantify – a trip to the shops that is at minimum great fun, and at best magic.