Remember those days when every village had a group of shops to provide all our needs? Remember when a row of houses had a shop placed somewhere in the middle of the row?
Or walking into a weird and wonderful shop where you had no idea what they sold but knew when you asked for fork handles they would actually have them in a shoe box on a shelf.
What happened to all those lovely little places that provided a living for a local family and a couple of jobs for nearby residents?
In East Lancashire, in tiny Kelbrook where I used to live there were 14 shops in the 1960s. There are none now.
What happened to these places that not only added character to where we lived but allowed us to get all our family needs met with a short walk? They provided a living for a family, not profits for shareholders in the city. They gave work to locals, keeping local money in the local economy.
They have all but gone now, lost and unvisited because we were sold an illusion. An illusion of convenience shopping and everything being cheaper somewhere else.
This illusion is as potent as ever today. People come into my health food store and ask for advice and the price of a product then walk out, more than happy to tell me they will buy it off the internet because it is cheaper, even when, by the time postage has been paid for it is not.
Shopping for our convenience, buying everything under one roof of a supermarket or at the click of a button on scAmazon (who treat their workforce so badly) has devastated our towns and villages. It has removed jobs, livelihoods and choice. It has left us at the whim of a buyer who decides what we shall see on the shelves. It has hoovered up local, hard earned money to be passed onto shareholders in the city to hide in offshore accounts in Panama.
Exactly who was this convenient for? We go into a supermarket, we serve ourselves then check out at the end of the process without having spoken to a single person. The only convenience of this shopping is to the supermarket who we hand our money over to thinking they have done us a good turn.
Often they don’t even sell the best quality or cheapest products but they let us think they do.
People still think local shops add a few pence to every product to eke out more money. We do not. And where there is an offer to be had we do our best to fulfil it for our customers.
And after the high street has been wiped out and you have to get into a car to go shopping in an out of town retail park please explain to me the savings made that you think you got whilst paying for a car, petrol, parking (by needing two cars some people have to remove their garden to create an extra parking space) and of course time. All this means we have millions more cars which are slowly grinding us to a halt. More resources used, more CO2 emissions, more lorries to get the products from somewhere else to somewhere here to have less choice given to you by someone else.
And everything is wrapped in plastic – for our convenience! A bunch of carrots that last a week wrapped in a plastic bag that lasts a thousand years should be an affront to all our souls.
And hidden under all of that is the drive to want everything as cheap as possible. The desire for a bargain drives people to Garstang ‘Charity shop’ town on a Thursday, market day. I’ve seen people piling into all the charity shops and barely setting foot in the local shops that pay a wage to those who work there. I’ve had people tell me I must be making a fortune as I count the loose change at the end of a month after all the bills and my lovely staff have been paid.
Cheapness means that at the end of the chain, farms have to become huge agribusinesses using chemicals and poisons to maximise production to improve margins because what they grow isn’t profitable enough. Machines replace people to harvest and grow. Science replaces nature to drive production and our soil slowly dies of exhaustion. Water courses are at risk of nitrate poisoning but without artificial fertilisers not enough will grow.
This sounds like some weird dystopian future but it is upon us right now. And above all it is affecting our health. How can adding poisons to our food be good for us but we want everything cheap so go along with the whole sorry illusion. Fooling ourselves as every morsel of the bread we eat contains glyphosphate weedkiller (a proven carcinogen) but hey, it was cheap right?
We want tropical fruits that have travelled thousands of miles but ignore the bountiful fruits that grow in our hedgerows and fields because it is convenient. We poison slugs with pellets which kill hedgehogs that would have eaten the slugs in the first place, because it is convenient.
We have it within our power to change this for the better right now. What knock on effect do our actions and choices have? Walk away from the myth of convenience and walk towards connecting with your local community. Look for quality above quantity and have pride in what makes our towns and villages unique.
And above all else, for the sake of you, me and our future on planet earth – shop local.
-By Nick Tofalos
