Thinking Local
How shopping in local businesses can help save the high street, the community and the planet
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As the Covid-19 crisis has enveloped Britain and the wider world, restrictions on peoples’ movement and their own desire to remain safe from the virus have unsurprisingly made an impact on the way we shop. Many have discovered that while avoiding vast big box shopping centres or huge supermarket megastores during lockdowns, their local retailers, however diverse, niche, weird or wonderful, can supply all they need and more, often at a rate more affordable than expected.
This local popularity throughout the pandemic has seen a growth in spending of 37.7% at small independent stores such as off-licenses, bakeries and grocers, even artisanal chocolate shops, wineries and jewellers, as overall consumer spending fell 36.5% in what’s been one of the toughest years on record for retail.
As lockdowns have lifted some shoppers have returned to the larger retailers, but the trend towards the local seems to have remained and looks set to continue—YouGov found that 70% of individuals who moved to shopping more locally during the pandemic will keep doing so into the future.
This is great news for the shops that kept and continue to keep us all well-stocked as we return to normality and bad news for inner-city chains, but for retail experts this could well be a step in the right direction. Attempts to corral shoppers back into big businesses rather than encourage investment in our local industries may well be a road to nowhere.
As retail guru Mary Portas told the Guardian, there’s “a whole new generation” of shoppers whose allegiances lie with the local boutique businesses that prioritise community and the environment rather than the stack high/sell cheap chains.This is not necessarily because people remain wary of the virus (though of course they do), but because of the increasingly appreciated virtues and positive knock-on effects of buying locally.
These benefits of shopping local have long been known to business insiders, and Time Out,American Express and Google have launched campaigns to support small businesses in the community, so this transformation in outlook isn’t simply a result of the pandemic but an ongoing trend that’s been accelerated by restrictions. Yet despite this tendency and its recent acceleration, many authorities continue to allow chains to dominate their high streets, ignoring how positive an impact local buying habits have on the communities they serve.
We’ve discussed in the past the pandemic’s drastic effects on the high street and the long-term hollowing out of the town centre shopping area by big business and governments’ continued determination to maximise retail floor space. One of our suggestions was that encouraging and supporting local independent business could be one way to tackle this decline. Certainly, at Walulel we understand the importance of buying local, and that’s why we’ve built it into the very fabric of our products.
Over 60% of shoppers fear for the future of their local high street and three fifths say they wish to do more to protect it. Research by Kantaralso found that 69% of UK consumers think local shops are good for their community. Why is it that the public consider local businesses so much more preferable for their area, and why should those with the power to change local retail ecologies take heed?
At their core, local independent stores provide a neighbourhood with character and help residents form a spiritual connection with where they live—for a lot of us, being recognised in and contributing to the corner shop as we buy essentials is more important than the potential cost-saving of grabbing a giant haul from the far-away retail park. The trust that is forged between the customer and the small company is done so on a personal level, with buyers knowing who and where they purchased goods or services from, rather than a faceless corporation with no personal accountability.
These shops, run by and for those in the community, rather than by shareholders and boards with no stake in the local area, know what residents want and need. They encourage participation in the community and offer an authenticity that is unique to that area, which is always going to be popular with locals, wherever it is.
But beyond the way these small businesses help in the formation of community and identity, the importance of which cannot be overstated at a time when our highstreets are being gutted and social hubs are disappearing at a rate of knots, they also act as the backbone of the local, and to a large extent country-wide, economy, offering quantifiable financial benefits to a community. Not least, it allows money to remain in the local area with, according to the FSB, 63p per £1 you spend being put back into the local economy, compared with only 40p from businesses headquartered elsewhere, as store owners patronise neighbouring cafés, pubs or shops, or pay for services nearby.
Certain taxes are also paid in the area which aid in the maintenance and provision of other infrastructure, such as public transport which can get customers to the door. Larger businesses hop on the coattails of those based locally and use these facilities paid for by the smaller businesses for their own benefit, while at the same time their taxes are often paid elsewhere with headquarters in other cities, or in countries with lower tax rates—if they pay any taxes at all!
The businesses themselves help each other out too, with a small restaurant perhaps providing food for the pub next door, who use the cleaning service round the corner, and in turn may provide the venue for the Christmas parties of both companies. Beyond the financial benefits for all, this comradery contributes to a happy and healthy community feel that allows locals to feel a genuine sense of place.
Jobs are also provided by small local businesses, which, counter to popular belief, employ the majority of adults in the UK at, on average, a higher average wage than larger chains. These employees not only further contribute to the economic cycle by investing their wages in the local community, but tend to be happier and stay in their jobs longer when compared with those who work in large corporations.
Employing local people further ensures that that extra 63p is reinvested in the community, an amount which multiplies with each transaction for the benefit of those who live in the neighbourhood. Small business owners’ profits that aren’t paid out in salaries tend to also be reinvested locally as long as they live nearby, and employee-owned co-operatives are more often found amongst smaller businesses, giving those who work there more income to help build their community.
Another, perhaps the most important, benefit of shopping locally is its relatively low impact on the environment in comparison to buying from larger and more distant chains, and recognising how our purchasing habits impact on the environment is essential to efforts going forward.
Supermarket and retail chains require products to be shipped long distances to guarantee a full stock of every kind of foodstuff at all times of the year as natural produce for food and goods is inherently seasonal and cannot be grown in one place at all times of the year. Not only does this transportation cause a great deal of pollution but it encourages damaging consumer behaviours.
While it may be exciting to see lamb from New Zealand, Strawberries from Morocco or Avocados from Mexico or Chile, alongside the pollution from transport, in many cases they require swathes of land or water that are either productive for another country’s local population or home to carbon-capturing forest. These lands are often cleared and used for the production of just one crop, the entirety of which is shipped abroad. Many of these crops also cause conflict and social issues in their countries of origin, and require a vast amount of water that is diverted from local farmland and the communities it provides for causing droughts.
Local stores on the other hand tend to source their goods from within a few miles, whether it be from nearby farms or craftspeople. This ensures that transport distances and the subsequent pollution are lower, and products ethically produced. It also encourages more ethical consumption, healthier seasonal diets, and the removes the need for industrial food production in faraway countries which damages local communities—thinking local at home in many ways also means helping local abroad.
As collective consumers, focussing on buying locally removes the need for big businesses to use such damaging methods to provide huge quantities of goods, much of which goes to waste anyway. According to agricultural scientists, just 6 supermarkets in Sweden produced 90 tonnes of food waste in a year, which in turn amounted to 140 tonnes of air pollution. The waste from plastic packaging too is a great problem, with Britain’s leading supermarkets creating over 800,000 tonnes of the stuff each year.
On the other hand, locally sourced produce tends not only to be healthier, coming into contact with fewer pesticides, but also reduces waste on its long, globetrotting journey and encourages consumers to only purchase the quantity they need, rather than a plastic wrapper full of too many spring onions.
Further still, shopping local means you can walk or take public transport to get there. Not only does this mean you’re lowering your environmental impact by not driving, but it also means fewer parking spaces and carparks which could be used for more community-focussed endeavours like parks or play areas.
You may even find more interesting products at your local store as there is more flexibility over what they are able to sell. And should you need a specific item, the request process is much simpler. Local stores can cater to local tastes and as part of the community they are able to understand and listen to customers to ensure that they can provide exactly what the community needs, offering them a business that is unique to that area’s demographic. This prevents supermarkets stocking exactly what the local population doesn’t need!
We do understand that sometimes it’s impossible to avoid shopping at big stores, whether it be that you’re in a rush, strapped for cash or need a specific item. However, we believe it is important that information regarding the virtues of shopping locally as discussed above is understood, articulated, and most of all made easily accessible.
That’s why we have built locality into all of our products. Our WaCommunicate, WaArtisan, and WaPatron platforms allow local businesses to advertise themselves and offer deals to those who live in a designated local area using our geospatial and geosocial services. Locals can put out requests for specific services or products that businesses or tradespeople can respond to, recommendations can be made and discussions about them had.
Our goal is to encourage the formation of closer bonds amongst communities, and we believe shopping, selling and staying local are just some of the ways of ensuring happens.