Net may save small traders (From Bucks Free Press)

Net may save small traders

10:54am Friday 19th February 2010 in

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Wycombe apparently has the fourth highest level of empty shops of any town in the South of England. The three bigger retail losers are Guildford, Southampton and Bracknell – in that order, the latter having a 19.3% empty shop rate. This is very clearly a sign of the times in terms of the disposable income of the majority of shoppers and their comparative reluctance to part with the cash they do have.

However, as always in times of change it can flag up an opportunity to rethink our town centres. The multinationals and supermarkets are building more out-of-town shopping malls and driving smaller shops and family concerns out of business; there is also the growth of internet shopping.

And yes, those mammoth concerns have their corporate toes in the door there too, as a result of their ability to undercut smaller traders with bulk purchasing. But, this also offers the opportunity, via the internet, for small niche traders, whose speciality shops foundered perhaps because the catchment area of their high street shop was insufficient to enable them to pay the ever soaring commercial rents and earn a living too. Now, via the internet, they can offer their special or unique products to a far wider customer base than before.

And here they have an advantage over the hyperdupermegamarkets.

Anyone who has seen a favourite product disappear off the shelves because “There is no demand sir” will know what I mean. The fact that I am demanding, pleading, cajoling, threatening to buy my coffee or bread or breakfast cereal elsewhere, counts for naught against the demands of the great god ‘Volume’. We have called this fate upon ourselves by demanding ever cheaper products, thereby squeezing out the grocers, fishmongers, butchers and hardware shops of our childhood memories. And there is no turning back the clock alas.

But as a random afterthought, do you ever as I do sometimes, walk along a town centre street and look up at the façades of the houses and imagine what preceded the superimposition of the glazed commercial shop fronts that obliterated some lovely regency and Victorian house fronts?

So, maybe let’s buy via the internet and from the out-of-town supermarkets and who knows, a decade or so from now we might see town centres to their former, residential glory? The night clubs etc. would have to move elsewhere too, of course.

Just a thought.