April 2015
Independent shopkeepers all around Islington are feeling the strain of competition from big business. Here, in the heart of the most progressive of Labour strongholds, the Conservatives are failing the people they need to win over to remain in government come May the seventh, namely the owners of small businesses.
One of the main issues, if not the main issue, this upcoming election is the economy. The Conservatives argue that they are on their way to mend the mess that Labour left them in. Unemployment is down! They say. People have more money to spend! They say. Britain is the fastest recovering economy in the developed world! They say. And most often and most repetitive of all: Our long term economic plan is working! They say. The only hitch they encounter to make this message hit home is the fact that a lot of people are not feeling this recovery. Some are even feeling that the opposite is true.
“There’s still a lot of fear of losing your job out there,” says economist at City University Keith Pilbeam. He describes a situation where people are wary of tax rises after the election, and a lot of scepticism if the recovery is all it’s cracked up to be. “A lot of the jobs that are created seems to be part time and not full time, which doesn’t create good income,” he says. Small, independent shops all around Islington are losing business, however it seems that the reason for this is not because of the residents of Islington lacking good income, but because of where they choose to spend their income.
With the introduction of Sainsbury’s and Tesco into the local Islington scenery among pubs and coffee shops, inner city Londoners now get the opportunity to take advantage of the benefits of big business, and avoid the mark up prices of the independent corner shop. “Day by day it decreases,” says Didembra Patel about his business. Didembra has worked at the Best One off license shop on Goswell Road for the last ten years. He directly attributes this decline to the larger supermarkets taking a lot of his customers, saying that if a supermarket is not much further away, that’s where the people go.
Agata Knox, who has worked at Regency Food & Wine on St Johns Street for the last seven years, agrees. “Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose, I feel like they are taking away customers,” she says. What these independent shops have in common is that there’s usually just one person working in the shop, standing behind the till. The interior of Regency Food and Wine looks like something from the seventies. The wooden panels at the back of the shop would look out of place in any modern supermarket, and the sun shining in through the windows produces more light than the lights in the ceiling.
Wall to wall with Regency Food & Wine lies Squires News owned by Satish Patel and his wife. The isles are stocked, but customers are scarce, one man walking out of the shop as I enter leaves me alone with the owners. “They’re gonna be there anyway,” says Satish about the supermarkets. He says that while business as a whole may be up, the profits are not trickling down to the average person.
The Sainsbury’s up the same street is light, somebody seems to clean the floor every time anyone with especially dirty shoes walks in. There are no wooden panels, no dim, headache inducing lights and not a single item past its best by date. There are three people at the tills, one directing customers to the self-help checkouts, and two more walking around the shop filling shelves with fresh fruit, washing up liquid and the odd bottle of wine. At times there are more people working in the shop than there are customers. The only reason that’s also true for the independent shops is because often, there are no customers at all.
“That’s the problem we face, the average consumer is still pretty wary,” says Pilbeam. Unemployment may be down, but the economist thinks the recovery is fake, and sooner or later the bubble is going to burst. “We’ve kept the interest rates low for a longer period of time, so we don’t know what bubble we’ve created. When we raise interest rates, how are people going to cope?”
Someone who isn’t coping is Murat Murat, the owner and shopkeeper of Embassy Electrical Supplies on Compton Road. “I don’t think I’m going to last here,” he says, sitting behind the register, the in house cat walking across the desk. The walls in the tiny shop are covered with cords, plugs, and surprisingly, olives. The one product keeping the business afloat is the only thing in the shop that hasn’t got anything to do with electrics. Murat has farms in Cyprus and Turkey, from where he brings over olive oil, olives and other foods. “We’ve been quite successful in that, we’ve been on the Gordon Ramsay show and Jamie Oliver,” he says. Islington has in recent years gone from an industrial area to a residential one, causing Murat to lose many of his customers. “We get a lot of orders, and a lot of people come here for [the olive oils], but I don’t know how long that can last in this area.” This has forced him to cut back on his own spending. “I can’t shop at Waitrose anymore,” he says and chuckles.
As the Conservatives has cut back on government spending, so has the public. “People are not spending their money as freely as they did in the good years, 2006-7, when we thought the sun would shine forever,” says Pilbeam. The Tories might argue that the clouds of the recession are on their way, but in the independent corner shops of Islington, it’s pouring rain.
Gustaf Kilander 