The shops we don’t care about
This year, I, like many others will feel a warm glow of smug satisfaction seeing how many of the Christmas presents I’ve bought have been from small or independent retailers. Just as I do when I pick up a loaf from the bakery rather than Waitrose, or a takeaway coffee from the local pub and resist the seduction of the many seasonal specials of Starbucks, Costa et.al.
When you shop small, you’re buying from a person and putting money into the local community. That’s why we do it. We love the products, we love the interaction with the person who’s delighted that you like their things, we love knowing that we’re doing the right thing by eschewing the big brands.
Big retail brands want us to care about them too, but we just don’t. Campaign after campaign designed to tug at the heartstrings and make us feel that warm and tingly connection to the brightly-lit, shiny-floored set of identikit boxes joined together under their shared glowing logo. Thinking that those TV ads, emails, radio slots and leaflets just can’t create the sort of emotional resonance that comes with the handwritten thankyou note in an Etsy delivery isn’t an easy thing for me to acknowledge, I’ve spent a lot of my life working on them in the hope that potential customers feel the way about them that those of us who created them do.
We see these big brands as corporate entities, a greedy and/or corrupt CEO being the only human face that comes to mind. Not somewhere we get a warm feeling from shopping, not somewhere we’re buying from a person. But the truth is, we are buying from a person. Many, many people in fact. They may not have individually chosen the fish they’re about to serve you or have knitted the jumper they’re folding carefully but they’re people. And the money you spend in those shops pays their wages, supports their families and, yes, goes back into your (and their) local community.
We shop for pleasure, or for convenience. And big brands with a predominately high street presence don’t really tick the box for ether. They’ve fallen down the gap between the happy experience of the small shops and the ease of clicking on a website and waiting for something to arrive at your door. They never really made us care, they were just the options we had until online made things easier for us.
