One of our staff came back from lunch yesterday saying “Have you been in [name of large store selling mainly cheap Chinese goods] lately? The shelves are practically empty”.

I hadn’t expected that. The large stores had been largely untouched by the crisis; or so we all thought.

Apparently the abundance of the large chain stores these last couple of months has been maintained by warehouse stocks that have now run down. Deliveries of cheap Chinese goods have been hit by the world crisis, and now it is showing. It may take them weeks or months to restock.

On the other hand, the small businesses in our area are well and truly opening up now.

Figuring I needed a new hobby, I decided to check out the local music shop. I’ve always wanted to play an instrument: the time had come, and I was keen to support the local economy. They must be struggling, I thought. In fact the place was packed. Everybody is taking up hobbies, from cooking to painting,  from fitness to fishing. The bookshop has been really busy, and even the crystal shop has queues.

Everybody is returning to the small shops where they get the service and information they need. Moreover, shopping in the large stores has been an unpleasant a humiliating experience.

And crucially, the small businesses are the ones with the flexibility to adapt to the circumstances – once the government takes the boot off their head, that is. In contrast, for the nationwide behemoths to change their business practices is a huge project, perhaps taking many months. The losses can be unbelievably huge.

We’ve all seen the effects of runs on food and toilet paper – fast to happen and slow to resolve. The small local businesses do not seem to have been affected in the same way. Many have closed their doors for reasons of ‘infection control’ and ‘government directives’, and may have gone under for that reason. They have been forced to shut, in other words. But crucially they have not closed because of lack of business opportunity; far from it.

Look at this all another way: suppose for the sake of argument there were to be a huge cataclysm, even bigger than what has happened this year.  Will the recovery of civilisation begin with supermarkets and nationwide suppliers of large domestic appliances? I don’t think so.

So here we all are thinking that the large businesses will survive, and many of the small ones will go under. Wouldn’t it be deeply ironic if it were in fact the other way around?

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