Local businesses vs Clone Town Britain

Our aim as a group is to help protect and expand Chorlton's great variety of locally-based, independent businesses. This has to involve limiting the growth of supermarkets and chain stores - after all, supermarket expansion relies on new customers taken from existing shops in the area, and it usually seems to be the smaller and independent shops that suffer. Supermarkets have grown at a direct cost to these businesses - it's no coincidence that during the period that supermarkets have grown so huge in the UK we have lost around 50 small businesses every week. The All-Party Parliamentary Small Shops Group reported in 2006 that independent convenience stores were unlikely to survive by 2015.
Read the full report here.

For more evidence on the impacts of chains and supermarkets see the New Economics Foundation's fascinating Clone Town Britain report.

Here's why we support local shops over supermarkets and chains:

Money spent local, stays local

Very little of the money we spend in chain stores and supermarkets actually remains to benefit our local area. Even if we spend our money close to home, much is siphoned off into the corporate accounts of the chains and multinationals that now dominate our economy. The Government's Social Exclusion Unit has reported that ‘the problem is not necessarily that too little money flows into a neighbourhood......Too often, it is spent on goods and services with no local presence, and therefore immediately leaves the neighbourhood'. Picture a £1 coin. Every time it changes hands within a community it means an income for a local person. The more times it changes hands, the better for that community.

Evidently, where and how we spend our money defines the impact it has on our communities. A UK study conducted by the New Economics Foundation demonstrated that every £1 spent with a local supplier was worth £1.76 to the local economy, but only 36p if it was spent with a chain. These benefits are gained through wages and benefits being paid to local employees (rather than shareholders), goods and services such as banking, accounting and maintenance being purchased from other local businesses (rather than national firms) profits going to local owners, and taxes being paid to local governments.

The environment can benefit

Friends of the Earth's Shop Local First report sums up the environmental argument for local shopping vs supermarkets.

"Supermarkets may have been grabbing the headlines with their claims to be green grocers but we believe that local shops and street markets have greater potential to be the sustainable retailers of the future. And in some respects they are already ahead of the big four.

• Research has shown that local shops are more energy efficient than big supermarkets. Large supermarkets emit on average three times as much carbon dioxide per square foot than an average greengrocer.
• In greengrocers and street markets fresh produce is often sold loose compared to only half of Tesco's fruit and veg - the rest being packaged. And a study by the Local Government Association (LGA) found that a higher proportion of packaging at street markets was recyclable than in the big supermarkets.
• Our own surveys of apple sourcing have shown that greengrocers and street markets sold a higher proportion of British apples when they are in season.
• And this is not just about specialist shops like greengrocers. Your average convenience store is more likely to be visited on foot by its customers. An important consideration, given that urban car journeys for food shopping rose 9% in one year between 2005 and 2006".

Our buying habits also impact on the way goods are produced. Patterns in supply as well as the sale of products are changing: once buying becomes centralised through chain stores, production has to do the same to keep up. This is perhaps most obvious in the food economy. Although interest in ‘local' and small scale food production has surged in recent years, most of our food is now produced on a mass scale, from highly ndustrialised farms to large scale production-line factories. Local and small scale producers are going out of business; we lose on average 17,000 farmers per year in the UK. These are overwhelmingly the small and family farmers who, held to ransom over prices by the supermarkets, are forced to either intensify production or go bankrupt.

The smaller, diversified farms that smaller retailers can deal with can also help to reinvigorate rural economies. In the UK, farms under 100 acres provide five times more jobs per acre than those over 500 acres. In addition, a higher proportion of their expenditure is spent on wages rather than equipment and the fuel to run it, the latter being almost immediately channelled off to equipment manufacturers and oil companies.

Local welfare

Small businesses account for the largest share of net new jobs generated each year, and locally based businesses provide some of the most stable employment opportunities in a community. For all their economic power, the number of jobs provided by global corporations is small. Between 1983 and 1999 the number of people employed by the 200 largest corporations in the world grew by 14% while their profits grew over 360%!

Unlike the owners of locally based businesses, the absentee shareholder owners of chain businesses often have little knowledge or concern for the consequences at the local level for action taken on behalf of the corporation. And the tremendous impact global companies have had on local economies is apparent in many ways. Despite the promises of employment creation, every time a large supermarket opens in a community, there is an average net job LOSS of 276 positions due to the associated closure of smaller businesses.