Smaller businesses, happier lives.
Small is beautiful, wrote E.F. Schumacher in the ’73. After that we have embraced the enterprise’s culture: growth up to dominate markets. Maybe is time to rethink that.
Today we received our food delivery. It wasn’t Deliveroo or Just Eat and not even Amazon. It was from the local veg small shop at the street corner.
A family business, not even a shop but just a stall on the pavement. My partner discovered them one day before the pandemic when she just stop once to buy some fruit she needed. During pandemic, in total lockdown, she asked him if he would be able to deliver.
Since then we are happy to oder from them, a message via Whatsapp with the list of vegs & fruits and after some time (you do not need to be precise on that), they pop up to our door with a box of fresh greens.
Probably the lockdown has also forced them to consider offering delivery service when they weren’t prepared before that.
No plastic is involved in packaging, just paper’s bags and recycled carton boxes (they receive them from their providers). Invoice is among the fruit and is written by pencil on a piece of paper. We pay it via bank transfer: once you have the recipient on the bank app, it just needs seconds. Not even intermediary: all the amount arrive directly into their account in seconds.
Few days ago I read a post on some social media:
When you buy from a local shop you do not support a manager to buy his third holiday home nearby the sea, instead you provide a family the money to put food on the table, enable kids going school, maybe taking lessons of music or gym around your local area, you actually support your own local community in survive and develop, and other small businesses around your home that create the very fabric of your city and society.
This is why small is beautiful: how many families can live upon small, local careful, client-centric businesses by connecting people on a direct, more human and personal level? Even in an insane city like London!
Climate change is in fashion nowadays:
How short and direct is the veg & fruit journey from producers, through such a local small shops, to our tables, avoiding warehouses and long transports reducing waste and inefficiency?
What difference can be made in the carbon impact by shopping locally from a short supply chain?
And last but not least: what better fragrance veg & fruit distributed locally, form someone you know personally, can maintain in such a short trip?
Higher quality of food with a lower carbon impact. No brain, isn’t it?
Of course that distribution model is not more efficient of the large surfaces, it is, instead, highly inefficient. More complex to sustain, inefficient per costs and effort including also thousands or even hundreds of thousands transactions where large distribution companies reduce them dramatically. But efficiency is not the sole way to go for humans; it is something important, but to just pursue efficiency, as Henry Mintzberg taught us, can be bad for the final outcome.
It is a change of paradigm that would imply a big shift in our human mindset: it is still too easy to drive at a supermarket to collect plastic pre-packed tomatoes without any taste. Or even order online by food delivery app that carries you home some veg arrived from who-knows-where.
The food supply chain can be very long. On high volumes that cost is spread and doesn’t matter much, but is another less clear mechanism that matter the most: when a business work on high volumes its logical focus is on the cost reduction, any cost, even the costs of row material: the product to sell. This is a competitive need that allows brands in reducing prices and get more convenient to shoppers, win their preferences and make profits.
Hence you get what they give you. Often un-flavoured, plastic-alike veg with probably zero or little nutrients.
The enterprises of food make money on the quantity we eat not by its quality.
Ok, shopping locally can appear more expensive, and it actually is. But only because the modern society do not takes into account the cost of waste, the inefficiency of plastic-packaging, and not either the cost of healthcare systems.
The GDP, Gross Domestic Product, arise when we produce waste food, when we pump oil out the ground to produce plastic and petrol that became pollution. It even grows if someone steal your car and you need to buy a new one. This is the logic that lead us to enable multinationals business and forget the local businesses.
Probably we all should think a moment on how to use our money wisely, maybe buying less but buying better, because even being rich is not about quantity you can have but about the quality of your own life.
If quality becomes important, well beyond food, then local services, small business would be again important either in employ more people, in creating more value at local level, in reducing impact and lately to reduce pressure on financial performances which is what has made our lives so hard.
Of course only local small businesses won’t be sustainable and it can lead to huge inefficiencies of the distribution system. But a better balance between big retailers brands and local shopping, local businesses can probably unleash potentials: the two system can better compete each other for more quality and better, more efficient services. But is not a political decision about it, is a people choice to buy more locally.
We decide what system we want to let thrive or die. Our day by day purchasing decisions makes the difference. This is also important for any other businesses, even online business that can serve a better tailor-made solution than big corporations.
A client of mine lately confessed me:
“ If I use a small company to develop my tech infrastructure, I know I can call the guy who lead the company if something goes wrong. If I use a multimillion brand, I’ll never be able to take someone accountable for what they should have done”
Decide what we buy makes the difference. Not expect someone else will make it.
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Read my previous story: “What a software engineer can learn by a bad haircut”
