Local business needs our help to stay alive
✒ MY career as an undercover operative began at the age of seven. My mum and I endeavoured to play the roles of an ordinary housewife/mother and her little boy, out shopping for groceries for the family.
The truth was far different. All our visits were to butchers, most often specifically to pork butchers, which were numerous in those days. Our journeys, mostly within the bounds of the city of Birmingham, took us aboard buses, trolley buses and trams. Quite tiring for a little lad.
My mum varied her purchases among sausages, pork pies, bacon, black pudding, etc.
Apart from the product, the weight requested and the price paid, she meticulously but surreptitiously recorded the number of customers in each shop, how long we had to wait to be served, the number and sexes of serving staff and whether they were polite and helpful.
When we got home, these details were transferred to report forms, along with “comments”- an opportunity for free expression.
The shops visited were “our” shops: a firm called WH Smart & Co. Our chief rivals’ shops: Marsh and Baxter. Plus independent shops selling “our” sausages and pork pies (etc) or else those of the enemy: Palethorpes.
Mission accomplished, mum’s reports were sent to WH Smart’s spymaster-in-chief and our purchases were requisitioned for weighing and examination.
Why recall all this at this time? Well, it was not the chief targets of our espionage (our local rivals) that we should have feared. The real enemy proved to be the supermarket, just as “online” is the foe of the retail shop 60 years later.
As we observe the current apocalypse in the high street, it is us oldies who can recall the earlier one which wiped out, within relatively few years, so many of those little shops (the butcher, the baker, the fishmonger, the dairy, the greengrocer, etc) which had been part of a housewife’s round of “going shopping” with its great opportunity for socialising (or as a man might put it, gossip).
The relentless trend is towards efficiency, convenience, and (above all) organisational bigness. There were always deliveries, of course, at least for the better off.
But you got to know the lad who delivered the box of groceries and he had time to exchange a few friendly words. Don’t try to hold a conversation with the man delivering the Amazon box. You don’t know him and he’s in a hurry.
Something was lost 60 years ago and something more is being lost now. The direction of change is the same.
The human touch and the local connection are more than ever disappearing. The Echo has a long record of supporting local businesses. Local is important. Local must be kept alive. If you are an oldie, teach the young that, if they will listen. And, by the way, tell them to buy the local newspaper. Dick Lloyd Thomas Cheltenham