Mt Eden locals save post shop but butchery goes
Change ‘inevitable’ as established businesses close and eateries open
Mt Eden’s main drag is a diverse stretch of road, including a jeweller’s, two book stores, a laundromat, florist, two pharmacies and several beauty salons.
But ask anyone and they’ll tell you the past five years have seen a slew of new eateries set up shop, and recently both the local butcher and the post office shut their doors.
Locals see the change as part of a natural evolution and like having more places to eat out.
Retailers also accept change is inevitable, but say there are fewer reasons for people to come to the village during the day so customer numbers will fall.
As rent in the area continues to rise, they don’t want falling customer numbers exacerbated, which they say will happen if Auckland Transport goes ahead with plans to extend bus clearway hours in the evenings and axe car parks to make way for bus stops.
On hearing the local stationery shop would close this month, taking the post office with it, Mt Eden pharmacists Lorraine Fletcher and Craig Hodgetts wouldn’t stand for it.
“We can’t have a village without a postal service,” Fletcher thought, so the couple arranged for NZ Post to shift the lot down the road, private boxes and all.
They were setting up yesterday, while not far up the road the last of the old post office was dismantled by builders.
“It’s really just community need,” Fletcher said of taking the service on. “If there’s the need, we could expand to the other missing bits.”
By that she meant selling stationery and magazines, as they used to do up the road, or filling other gaps created as long-standing businesses closed for one reason or another.
“Otherwise, people will go to malls, and we can’t have that.”
Gone for good is the Pokeno butchery, which closed in late March after the building’s landlord chose not to renew the lease. Owner Helen Clotworthy was devastated, feeling she’d left customers in the lurch after nearly six years.
“I don’t get it,” she said of her landlord’s decision not to renew the lease.
Locals, many of whom are retired, factored in errand runs to the village as part of a routine which helped them get out in the community, she said.
Clotworthy and her husband still sell meat in Pokeno but she misses her Mt Eden customers.
“We drove up and down it every day for all those years. It’s a privilege to stand behind a counter.”
Locals spoken to by the yesterday said a wider and better variety of cafes and restaurants had been setting up in the past five years or so, with a particular boom in the past year.
Lizzie Walsh has been in Mt Eden 13 years. She said it was nice having an array of village services and she’d been sad to see the butcher’s go, but it was great for locals to have more choice about where to eat out: “That’s just progress.”
Steve Roper, chairman of the Mt Eden Business Association and local optometrist, said change was normal.
“If somewhere closes and is replaced by a restaurant it’s great for the village, but it’s not great for daytime retail,” he said.
Both Roper and fellow Business Association member Frances Loo were focused on fighting plans by Auckland Transport to extend clearway hours and introduce new bus stops at the expense of car parks.