Love Local Shops!

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

• Becoming a B Corp
• Top trend predictions for Christmas 2021
• Self-sacrifice: The importance of building a leadership legacy centred on others
• Undercover Boss
• Can/should bosses really be close friends with their staff?

Customers love local shops, and I hate the attempted take-over of these stores by the supermarkets

Even Waitrose is getting involved in these increasing attempts to permeate the whole of our shopping experience. Whilst the chain came out way on top of a recent customer experience survey, even their good service will only ever be light years behind the much more personal service people receive in a local shop.

How encouraging then, in spite of all the competition from supermarkets, to see The Grocer reporting that community stores, run by co-operatives and social enterprises, grew by 7% in 2010, with an average of 19 new shops opening on average each year.

However, more concerning is the fact that the Co-operative Group is getting in on the act. While the company might be ‘good with food’, my experience is that they are ‘appalling with people’, and only seem to employ staff who haven’t got a clue about customer service!

Community shops are only there to serve their local customers. They are non-profit-making businesses, employ local people and don’t have share-holders to please, so they can also be good value.

At Cotswold Fayre we are supplying a growing number of these enterprises and I can also say with experience that they pay their bills on time, and their staff are very polite and courteous to deal with. Let’s have more of them!

We are all just about to enter a trading period with more adjacent bank holidays than Christmas, so look forward to a profitable couple of weeks. Logistically though, I don’t think the Government has a clue how difficult it is to run a business when there is a plethora of bank holidays that come one after another.

It is impossible to run a distribution business on a three-day week. As a result, our staff will all be working two out of four bank holidays, which will give us the ability to say ‘business as usual’, and try and maintain all our deliveries on their normal days, at a cost to our bottom-line.

I was amazed yesterday to hear on the government VAT advice line that, due to the extra bank holiday, VAT payments would need to be made earlier than normal. That’s really helping out small businesses, isn’t it?!

Next week being the holiday weekend, I may be too busy working, so you might not hear from me. Have a Happy Easter!