Why ATLS?

Personal View

Peter Riches is managing director of BeVivid, a web based marketing consultancy based at Condover. He is also creator of All the Little Shops, a unique multi-shop single-payment website which is being supported by town centre management groups across the UK for the benefit of small independent retailers. Peter’s experience in town centre advertising, design and marketing spans nearly twenty years and he and his team have helped clients achieve three Purple Apple Merit Awards and a prestigious Council Beacon Award for Shrewsbury. With reports of 2000 independent retailers going out of business each year Peter is seriously concerned about the future of Britain’s town centres.

Driving footfall into town centres has become an increasingly difficult task for town centre managers since e-commerce brought us the luxury of shopping from the comfort of our own homes. And with consumer spending down and travel costs up, the situation is getting rapidly worse.

High Street retailers battling each other in daily price wars are finding it hard to move stock, even at rock-bottom prices, and the little independent shops that feed our taste for the unique are getting lost in the fight and disappearing at the rate of 2,000 a year. Unless we can arrest the demise of all the little shops we could find ourselves in the situation of losing over 50,000 businesses nationally, as early as 2015.

There are of course massive benefits to e-commerce, which is why I moved over from being a traditional advertising agency almost four years ago to building clients’ businesses via intelligent e-business solutions. But for the little shops that are usually owner managed, the sophistication of a database driven website with guaranteed dynamic presence and catalogue and purchasing facilities, is almost certainly going to be out of their financial reach.

Two weeks ago I was making a presentation to delegates at the Association of Town Centre Management Summer School in Liverpool, and just about everyone was talking about the plight of the little shops and how best to help them compete on a level playing field with on-line multiple retailers. Through Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) which were set up to promote Town Centres, funding is available for managers to buy into schemes such as All the Little Shops, but the big question is whether they can move fast enough to save these small independent retailers in the face of a credit crunch that is forecast to last up to five years.

Aside from the lack of footfall to keep local trade alive at grassroots, another great danger of people physically not going out into the town centres is that there is less awareness of the value that small businesses provide – simply because they are not seen. According to the Federation of Small Businesses, more than 50% of the turnover of independent retailers goes to the local community - compared with just 5% from supermarkets. And, more alarmingly, 42% of English towns and villages no longer have a shop of any kind.

With its Keep Trade Local campaign the FSB is tirelessly lobbying politicians at both local and national levels to save the independent retailers - and there is no doubt they are beginning to sit up and take notice, as I discovered when I recently met with Philip Dunne MP to explain to him how All the Little Shops works. But if there was a Save the little Shops campaign in every town across the country the work of the FSB might be a little lighter. Independent retailers are at the heart of local economies and communities, providing jobs and, between them, giving us a range of choice that we will find nowhere else. Independent retailers need, and deserve, our support.

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