Life and Times – The Drinks Stop

This column has talked previously about the perils of being your own boss. I focused on a doughnut and coffee shop that had opened in my area and the difficulty it was likely to face in surviving. What happened after that was, following the expected lull in summer trade from its largely student clientele, it closed for a break and then it never reopened. Now, just round the corner from where the doughnuts are no more, a new business has opened up. It’s a sort of general store with the name ‘Drinks Stop’ emblazoned across its front, having taken over what had been a longstanding ironmongers, a shop that was much loved by the community and whose disappearance was much lamented when its owner retired.

The furore

What it would then become was the subject of much local discussion, and that exploded recently when ‘Drinks Stop’ opened. Some on the local Facebook forum have given it approval because it at least meant that the premises were in use again. But the majority have given it a decisive and, in some cases, scathing thumbs down. Partly because much of what it’s selling simply reproduces the stock of another convenience shop barely 50 yards up the road, but mostly because of the new shop’s particular appearance. Its façade is shiny black plastic panelling with bright yellow lettering that completely covers the original corner-shop period frontage with its curved glass windows and ironwork entrance. Comments about it on social media have included ‘ugly and inappropriate’ ‘an ‘eyesore’, ‘a carbuncle’, ‘a blot on the landscape’, ‘an utter abomination’, and – even – ‘it looks like a sex shop’. A more ‘moderate’ objection has been that its appearance is just out of character with the neighbourhood’s traditional architecture, with someone observing ‘it might not be so bad if it were one of a whole stretch of shops with different facades, but, as it stands, it really is an eyesore’.

Success or failure?

Whatever the case, just like the failed doughnut shop, an enormous amount of time, energy and expense has gone into converting the original premises, both inside and out, to what it is now. Yet, if the social media furore is anything to go by and translates into people shunning it, the odds seem to be against it doing enough business to be successful. And if that happens, the family who’ve opened it will see the enormous effort they’ve made to be their own boss come to nothing and they’ll be forced back into the situation of looking for employment and trying to find someone else to be their boss. Which in fact, so the statistics show, is what happens to the vast majority of workers who seek an escape route from the job market and the tyranny of employment by setting up on their own. Even if they undertake market research first and some do – though maybe the ‘Drinks Stop’ proprietors didn’t – that doesn’t remove the risk of their venture failing. In reality, it is impossible for them to know with any kind of certainty whether their new business will ‘pay’, given the uncertainty and unpredictability of the economic system we all live under, which defies the best laid plans of humans and which even governments can do little to control.

So, as things stand, ‘The Drink Stop’ will be competing with the other store we have mentioned just up the road. It may manage to capture some of its business, but, since the clientele overall is unlikely to increase, it seems improbable that both will survive. It‘s not difficult in fact to imagine that the two stores will end up doing each other down with both eventually closing their doors – and this also in view of the additional fact that there are two other supermarkets, big-name ones (Tesco and Sainsburys), less than ten minutes walk away.

Dog-eat-dog or human connection?

Standing in the street looking at these two local shops, the thought that comes to my mind is why do we put up with (and even support, as many do) a system that has at its heart – and on a colossal scale the world over – an ethic of dog-eat-dog competition and whose inevitable outcome is waste and human frustration? After all humans are equipped for cooperation and connection to one another, even though they (we) are currently stuck in a social system that promotes competition and selfishness. Why instead don’t all of us who are forced to sell our energies to an employer for a wage or salary throughout most of our lives get together and act consciously and democratically to put an end to that dysfunctional system and opt instead for the moneyless, wageless society of free association and free access that we call socialism?

HOWARD MOSS