I was reading about some local policy changes intended to make running a small business easier and that got me thinking. I go to restaurants and ethnic food stores which are usually small businesses, and maybe some of the gas stations I use are small businesses too. However, everything else I buy comes from big-box stores or the internet. These have replaced a lot of small businesses, but how is it that there are any little shops left at all? Sometimes I walk into a corner store because I don’t want to go all the way to the big box store or wait for delivery but the prices are so much higher (often by over a hundred percent) that I walk right out again unless I need something very urgently.
I’m not making a moral judgement here. I just don’t know how the economics work out.
I’ll grab some beers from the minimarkt at most. Everything else comes from the supermarket. And I often pass those tiny stores that never seem to have any customers – e.g. a shop just for socks? – and I always wonder how they can exist. There must be some kind of tax breaks or tax evasion going on.
I do wonder about stores like that. According to a friend of mine who worked on the household staff of a very rich family, they did buy extremely expensive stuff in boutique stores even when much cheaper alternatives were almost as good (or even equally good, I suspect) but how many rich people like that are there? That same friend told me that at least some of those stores are vanity projects for that same sort of rich person - they want to own the sort of store they think is cool or cute, and they don’t actually need it to turn a profit.
Yeah I suppose those boutique shops are more for rich people but there’s shops with cheap stuff too, often kind of hidden and unwelcoming. I used to live across from one for a while before I even realized it was a shop, and it was still open. Just saw the guy closing up but never saw a customer. I had a look out of curiosity and it was just some old guy selling bottles of washing liquid and everything was covered in a layer of dust like it hadn’t been touched in years. He looked happy to see a customer so I felt sorry for him to just walk out again.