That some small businesses are failing because they don’t adapt to the needs of their customers?

[Isawyou]

I try to shop local. Fortunately I do have some great independent places nearby.

What I am finding frustrating is for example the fruit and veg shop closes at 4.30pm. They start packing up at 3.45pm and it is really difficult to buy things from there where they are stacking all the stands with the produce inside. They also look unhappy at customers coming to buy at packing up time. It is easier to go to the Tesco express that stays open until midnight.

Other shops do not open until 10am and close early. So I can’t get there before work or after work.

They complain their businesses are not doing well and people do not shop local but they are not exactly facilitating it for the customers either.

GP surgeries is a distraction on this thread, But as they've been raised, what's their incentive to open for longer or at different times? - if you are lucky enough to get an appointment, you'll have observed that the waiting room is full of frequent fliers for whom 9-4 Mon-Fri is never going to be a problem.

He had a call on Friday, and this Sunday, how much will it be, do you charge a call-out? In his line of work people asking those questions are either passed on or rejected outright

But how would the customer know how much they’ll be charged if they don’t ask how much it will cost? That’s crazy, I’d never employ a work man or contract a service without knowing the cost.

I came to also post about staying open late on a Thursday. By all means, close if you can early or all day on any other day and stay open a bit later on Thursday. Saturday are too busy for us normally though

How can they give you a cost if the business doesn't know what the problem is.
Broken boilers are unpredictable and have multiple faults.
Plus upon asking the customer what model the boiler was the customers didn't know. Nor did they respond to requests to send a photo in. In the delete bin.
Other businesses in the same field offer a labour fixed price to come out between £250-£350. Plus parts.
However the repair is guaranteed for 30 days only and there could also be multiple faults.
Cars are similarly unpredictable and impossible to give a fixed quote.
People fishing for costs are a pita.

I made a conscious decision to shop local for a niche product (local in this case was quite far away as it was a niche product- specialist board game)

We bought it. Paid £30 MORE than game cost on Amazon plus had to pay £10 for delivery. I could have saved £40 shopping on Amazon. 😡

I can't afford those principles anymore. Now I need to find the cheapest option in every single case.

I've also ignored that shop because they are very political and don't agree with single sex spaces for women and vulnerable children/adults.

That was so stupid of the pet shop but sadly so typical of what one encounters in small businesses.

“Fishing for costs”? You think it’s completely unreasonable for someone on a budget to even ask what a job might roughly cost and say they are “fishing for costs”? What a disgusting attitude.

GPs DO provide Saturday and evening appointments - usually via a central hub, because takeup is actually very low (most people GPs see are retired patients will multiple chronic health conditions, not working-age people with acute self-limiting illnesses), and it is pretty wasteful to have every single GP practice open but only seeing a couple of patients each.

But you can indeed get a saturday appointment if you want one.

My dentists office has an email address on their website which whenever you email it bounces back as that doesn't exist. When I called them I mentioned that the email address listed on their website is sending back an error, the response was we don't use that one, heres this completely different one to contact that is listed nowhere else. 3 years later the incorrect email is still on their website and they haven't done anything to change it.

They have more than enough business that it clearly doesn't matter to them if they aren't accessible by email but I find it so irritating that they can't be arsed to just take the wrong address off the website if they don't want people emailing them rather than having people go to the trouble of emailing and then it bounce back so they have to call.

Our practice does not offer extended hours for anything other than a 'routine' appointment, and does not offer any weekend appointments. Diagnostic out patient services may be available at weekends, but not provided by the GP.

@Teatime55

I don’t think some businesses understand that there is a playoff between cost/convenience.

They do, but customers don't understand how much extra it costs for the convenience they want. Staffing a shop/cafe for longer doesn't come cheap, nor do the variable overheads such as heating and lighting.

Customers don't understand that the shop pays a hell of a lot more for the products it sells than a supermarket pays, in fact, it's often the case that supermarket selling prices are lower than the shop pays from the suppliers/wholesalers, hence lots of small shops actually buy trolley fulls of goods from Tesco, Morrisons, Aldi, etc - it's cheaper than going to their local Booker wholesaler!

Customers may be "happy" to pay a few per cent more for convenience, but shops can't make a profit on small margins, hence why things can cost a lot more in small places than online or bigger stores, often 25-50% more! That's not all profit for the small shop - they still make less per item than the big store selling at lower prices.

How can they give you a cost if the business doesn't know what the problem is.
Broken boilers are unpredictable and have multiple faults.

So surely asking if there’s a call out charge to look at the boiler and establish what the problem is, and to provide a cost for the repair once it’s known would be a reasonable ask.

The VAT thing is absolutely correct. The owners of several Italian chip shops round here disappear back to Italy for weeks at a time and it’s as much about staying under the VAT threshold as it is seeing their family. Obviously they probably still do a roaring cash trade too that they don’t declare😆

Busy shops with long opening hours also close down! Being busy doesn't mean being profitable. Our village Spar shop closed down last year. It always "appeared" busy, opened 7am to 10pm daily, did all the usual things like off licence, lottery, cash machine, typical Spar range of foods and other goods, etc. Just not enough people using it to buy things that they made enough money on. Far too much of the sales were low profit items so it simply didn't make any profit overall after the ever increasing costs of staffing it for so many hours.

Yep, VAT is absolutely killing small businesses and stopping them from expanding. VAT registration threshold hasn't changed since 2017 and won't chance until at least 2024. At a time of high inflation, that's disgraceful. Of course it helps bigger businesses by reducing competition!

VAT registration is a nightmare. You finally find your feet as a business and start to have better income and then wham! Huge bill. It's awful.

Not read the full thread but I've never really understood the whole "independent is better" thing. Not always. Not even often, in my view. I'd rather go to an independent cafe because they often (again, not always) have better coffee than the likes of Costa or Starbucks. But I'd rather buy my clothes from a chain (even a small one like Lazy Jack's) because they usually have better more reliable opening hours and refund policies.

People say "well it's better to give your money to local people". Yes but the people who work in the chains are local and spend money locally, even if the profits go elsewhere.

I've also seen the "we don't have wifi, talk to each other" signs in cafes. Guess what - you can look at your phone quickly to check something AND talk to each other!

This is really annoying.

I'm not a dentist but we are constantly updating our website and keeping everything correct.

Sure, of course they do- shops close for many different reasons. But I am referring to shops who moan about not having enough trade whilst at the same time barely being open- the two things are often connected as is evidenced in this thread by people saying they are unable to shop locally due to being at work etc

She has meeting rooms too and even they caused drama when lack of clear signage meant people had to ask her where the rooms were. She got so flustered and cross with people. Just make the signs clear and they won't need to bother you

Oh gosh, yes this! I've also had people say "there's a sign". Yes, but it's not clear.

And if you run a cafe please make it clear if it's table service or bar/counter service. So many cafes don't. Why do they expect you to be telepathic?

In the kind of scenario you describe I’d argue that the shop owner needs a better understanding of his/her customers, not the other way round. Very few people are going to regularly pay 25 to 50% more than supermarket prices for stuff the smaller shop owner, erm, bought in the supermarket!

It doesn’t matter to the customer that the price per unit is more for the small guy than Tesco/Asda etc, or that their overheads are high. A tin of beans is a tin of beans. Faced with those kinds of prices the majority of customers will quite understandably think “I can get this far cheaper” and that’s what they do. It’s just not a viable business unless the little shop is in some food desert because otherwise the supermarket is generally more convenient too in terms of parking, opening times and so on.

Well said! I'm not sure why some people in this thread are acting like we are all walking around with wads of spare cash in our pockets and are just choosing to be "unkind" to local shops out of sheer spite.

Most of us, including me, are having to stick to a strict budget now that everything has gone up. I'm not paying 25-50% more on something that takes me out of my budget just for the sake of a local shop owner. I cant afford to do that.

Why does their livelihood and ability to cope financially trump my own?

🤢 I think I've just became a vegetarian.

I find that some of these local shops lack basic customer service and the staff can be so rude. I went to a local health food store and I simply asked the owner if they had non aluminium deodorant's without baking soda (sensitive skin). She asked me why, and I replied that I read it's not good for people with sensitive skin and could explain why I was getting rashes. Well, she then proceeded to laugh and say how foolish I am and that I shouldn't trust what I read on the internet- because of that experience, I refuse to enter that shop again and just pop into Holland and Barret.

You can do pork in few of days, considerably shorter wait time than for beef. We had outdoor pig slaughters in my native country where couple of families bought live pig, butcher shot it, it was processed right there and then and started eating in few days.