On the first - Oh dear! What a completely
inaccurate and misjudged message on that sign! There's nothing wrong with
voluntarily paying that little bit extra to support local shops - particularly
when the products are better and there's a community relationship.
But if I saw a sign like
that, I'd be more inclined to not give them my custom, because the message they
are trying to convey is a load of tosh!
The reality: when you buy
from a big business you also help a little girl get her dance lessons, a little
boy get his jersey, and a mum and dad put food on the table - many many little
girls, boys and mums and dads, in fact.
When you buy from the
likes of Sainsbury's, Tesco, McDonald's, Burger King, etc you help support the
living of thousands of cashiers, shelf-stackers, fast-food workers, drivers,
machine manufacturers, and by extension countless other businesses too numerous
to mention.
Furthermore, when you add
up the net benefits to families in terms of extra money in their pockets due to
supermarket price wars - which I read in Forbes a few weeks ago to be nigh-on
£11 billion pounds - it really does expose the short-sightedness of this
particular 'local' shop.
On the second - Now I've no doubt that this
mass response has good intentions at its heart - after all, when there is the
square peg of unused food in supermarkets and the square hole of a lot of hungry
people in our country that cannot afford their weekly meals, nobody wants to
think of wasted food and desperate people missing out.
But as is usually the
case, the intentions may be noble, but there are potential problems that the noble
intentions fail to capture, as I blogged about here.
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