Urban Outfitters fixes shopping with classic games consoles

Shopping can be stressful at best, soul-crushing at worst. People walking TOO SLOWLY in front of you; shops that look like jumble sales; cashiers who feel the need to comment on every item of clothing you're buying, to the extent that they're definitely being sarcastic ("oh, what a TRENDY jumper"). 

All of these panic-attack-inducing factors are reason enough to loathe shopping and secretly wish we lived in a communist society, in which the state would simply hand us a pair of denim overalls and tell us to get on with it.

But until we inevitably rise up and throw off the shackles of our greedy capitalist overlords, I'm afraid shopping is here to stay. And that means we simply must find a coping mechanism – some way to alleviate the mind-numbing tedium of flicking through endless rails of T-shirts adorned with edgy slogans and ironic band logos.

Fortunately, at least one retailer has been good enough to recognise the sheer mundanity of shopping in general. Urban Outfitters is offering us the chance to leave behind the racks of clothes that will never look as good on you as they do on the stupid expressionless mannequins, and escape to the world of videogames.

That's right, the high street chain has installed a kind of wooden gaming cabinet with built-in seats at its branch in Nottingham's Victoria Centre. It looks quite uncomfortable to sit in, if we're honest, but importantly it contains at least one glorious Sega Mega Drive – the console that's widely accepted to be mankind's greatest ever creation.

Speaking to the Mirror, staff at the shop confirmed that the consoles are located in the store's basement, while a Reddit user claimed classic games machines can now be found in every large Urban Outfitter across the country. So it looks 

One of the consoles lets you play Pac-Man. If you think about it (but not too carefully), Pac-Man – in which the eponymous yellow-circle-head-thing wanders around endless dark, cramped corridors forever and ever until he dies – is actually a pretty accurate representation of how it feels to shop at most retail outlets.