We received a very worrying email yesterday from one of the town’s shopkeepers.
Over the past few months, it appears that less and less people have been using the small independent shops in Ventnor, preferring instead to do their shopping in one place – the supermarket.
Many of the shops are now really struggling to keep going, some of them having to borrow heavily, just to pay the bills each month.
As the writer of the email said, “many people complain about Somerfield, but continue to still shop there”. It’s understood by all, that everything people need can’t always necessarily be found in the independents, so they may sometimes have to shop at the chains. But from experience, only using the supermarkets for the products that you absolutely can’t get elsewhere, isn’t that hard to do.
Like many people, including those who work during the day, when we’ve only been able to get round to do the shopping after 6pm, we’ve had to resort to supermarkets. And we have to admit that over recent weeks (when having visitors staying), we’ve fallen into the trap doing a big shop at the supermarket.
We do try to balance that by making an effort to shop locally on Saturday and all other times, but this message from the local shopkeepers is a real wake up call – and something that we all should remind ourselves of every time we go shopping.
The correspondent finished with this worrying statement:
“With no shops to speak of, it will become a developers paradise. Everything will be up for grabs. My shop will end up like many others, a very small shop with flats above and below. If local people want to keep local shops, then it is about time that they all started to use them regularly, otherwise, one day they will wake up to find that they are living in Benidorm, without the weather and the cheap flights.”
What you read above is a message from the horses mouth. We’re going to do what we can through VB and in person to encourage people to start shopping locally again, starting with this post and continuing with interviews over the next few weeks with shopkeepers.
This is a subject that we’ve covered many times before, it would be great if we could collectively try to make sure that Ventnor shopkeepers are supported throughout the year.
