Article 4820 | Island Views
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UK Local Shop Takeovers


History Of UK Local Shops Takeover Strategies:

Over the last 70-90 years UK history has shown us, that Caribbean retail outlets supply chains within the UK have become dominated by Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Pakistani suppliers. All four have had similar successful strategies. (More recently we have had an emergence of Somalian and Polish retail supply chains, but operating on a smaller scale.)

These strategies have been successful through the combinations of managing their shops at low cost, due to small business startup funding, religious funding, staffing by family, friends and religious support, giving them a ready supply customers and a ready supply of staff (volunteer staff, no pay support staff, low pay staff, ad-hoc staff, part-time staff, shift-workers and minimum wage staff) and 24 hour opening times, this allowed them to drive down the prices to push their competitors away, or out of business, plus often taking over their competitors shops.

Once rival business retail outlets such as corner shops or post offices had been conquered, their strategy was then to slowly increase the prices to obtain the maximum profits, because they no longer had any competition other than the supermarket chains and to a lesser extent the petrol stations.

Once they were in the position of controlling a shop, they then had control of the retail supply outlets to the customers locally in their area, they then worked backwards through their retail supply chains, controlling who they purchase from, this led to them mainly trading with others of their own culture throughout their entire retail supply chains and management structures.

Using their own cultural contacts and their retail supply chain buying power, allowed them to dictate local retail prices and who ultimately were employed (often favouring management and workers who were of their own cultures).

Their strategies have had an effect within the Islands and throughout the entire Caribbean, right down to those workers doing the planting, growing, harvesting, processing, bottling & assembly, sales and marketing and shipping, in fact the whole supply chain process, meaning those who were originally native to the islands did not get much of this work.

Their strategies continues to the present day and is more intense.

In order to combat this monopolising of local retail supply chains and jobs, plus also to reduce the inflated costs of some shops, it is important that we all support small local independent shops and the services of all the other cultures equally where we live, so that we keep healthy competition alive in our local areas.

It is also important to have more Caribbean owned shops and outlets, dedicated to Carribean grown produce and Carribean made products.

 

See another article in this series:

The Power Of Your Tiny Individual Purchases

Ackee A Commercial Wakeup Call To The Caribbean

 

Posted by under Food & Drink, Grocery, Jobs

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