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.
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.