You’ve seen all the plugs for shopping locally, haven’t you? Support your local, independent business for these reasons. And you can do so in all manner of ways, as shown here, in this ad stolen from someone in Swindon:
I try to do just that. For example, if I visit a small, independent book shop, I will usually buy a book, not necessarily because I need a new book, but because I want the bookshop to prosper. If my partner and I are visiting a shop packed with bric-à-brac, or tat as I describe it to my beloved partner just to wind her up, there will usually be something we can pick up, sometimes useful, sometimes useless; it doesn’t really matter. But if we don’t support local businesses, then soon there won’t be any. Take our local area.
Where I live, we are struggling in the local business department because there is barely any of it. We have two independent barbershops, a fish and chip shop, a Chinese takeaway, a dry cleaning service and a Post Office. The rest are parts of chains, like estate agents and the inevitable, but I have to say much loved, Tesco Express and I mean loved, especially because of their excellent, professional, super-friendly long-serving staff. Beyond that, there’s very little that’s local.
I grew up in the Brislington area of Bristol and its focal point was Brislington, or Briz, Village. We had an independent newsagent (ask your grandparents, kids. It’s where people bought newspapers), a cobbler, a dairy and a butcher. And from what I can remember, which isn’t much, the shops were very popular and well-used, albeit not by us because we barely had a pot to piss in and items such as fresh meat and dairy products were essentially luxury items. So, what changed? Simples. Supermarkets which were so much easier to use.
We had a few in our area and the big thing was that you could get everything you needed in a single shop and it was cheaper than using independent stores. Whether the quality was the same is an entirely separate matter but soon the local indies were closing down and the supermarkets were growing in number.
My grandparents lived on Sandown Road in Briz and at the top of the road was Bleathman’s, a general store run by toothy owner Ken Bleathman. These little independent stores were everywhere. Now there are none. These days, Briz Village is totally unrecognisable from its bustling past, due in part to the collapse of independent businesses but mainly because of the heavy traffic that chokes the area seven days a week, although the latter is another story.
The simple facts show that the more affluent areas of the country are more likely to have independent stores. We visited parts of the Cotswolds last year and the independents were thriving. A few years ago, I visited Witney in Oxfordshire, a very well-off and beautiful town, and it was hard to find a ‘chain’ store, not that I particularly wanted to. Our own inner cities and even the middle class burbs have in the main lost most or all of their indie stores and that’s a real shame. Is there anything we can do about it?
Probably not. The way we shop has changed forever and will continue to change. Many of us order the things we need from the comfort of our own homes, using the simplicities of our own phones. The village I grew up in, with independent shops and no less than four local pubs, is not alone in no longer being a village.
Tesco and any other supermarket you can name did not kill independent shops. We did that because we found the new way of shopping was easier and cheaper than the old ways.
I’ll use other people’s local shops and services if I can but for most of us shopping local means going to Tesco, or Sainsburys or wherever. And if our little supermarket is anything to go by, I don’t see too many people complaining.
