Nowadays, there is a diminishing demand for small local shops as most consumers prefer all in one large supermarkets or directly buying online. Local communities suffer from this, as the local shops closing lead to more unemployment and provoke a drop in tight knit community’s cohesion. The state could avoid these issues by introducing a higher tax for large supermarkets and providing financial help to local shops.
Since people would rather buy all their products from the same store, in bulk, hence cheaper and all at once, small local shops are suffering from the dominion of hypermarkets and online stores which is leading them to financial difficulties . Since there is no need for small shops anymore, they are prone to financial difficulties as their businesses are not sustainable. Workers are let go meanwhile members of the communities are no longer seeing and communicating with each other on a day to day basis. To illustrate, if a village has no local stores anymore and only one hypermarket accessible by car, villagers will not interact and this will lead to most villagers feeling lonely. Clearly, the consequences of no local shops, in order for people to spend money and for them to meet each other, is solitude and financial problems.
While large supermarkets and online shops such as Amazon are harmful for local communities, the state should encourage people to spend locally by helping local stores financially and increasing tax on large corporations. Moreover, by helping local stores financially, their prices can decrease, making their products more financially interesting for consumers. Since customers would prefer to buy locally in order to avoid having to take transports, if the products were sold for a similar price, consumers would flock there instead of going to supermarkets. Another way to solve this issue is to put in place a higher tax on hypermarkets and online megastores, raising the prices of the products as well as corporation’s revenue and thus inviting customers to shop elsewhere. On the other hand, a tax would also harm the entirety of customers, even those living by themselves with no local shops or those who have to shop online due to physical problems for example. These people would be deeply affected as they would have no choice but to spend more.
Overall, even if large supermarkets and online shops are currently leading small local shops to more financial problems, to a rising unemployment as well as to people feeling lonely, the government helping out the local stores and forcing an increase in supermarket’s prices may lead to better times for the communities.