Diary of a Shopkeeper, 3rd January
The good old days: a wine trade fair in Paris, February 2020
The independent shopkeeper’s year has patterns as regular and predictable as the ploughing, sowing and harvesting of an Orkney farmer.
In January there’s a sale and stocktaking, in February and March there are trade fairs in Glasgow, Birmingham and London. Easter brings the start of the tourist season, with small numbers of visitors growing steadily till in July and August they fill our streets and shops. Tourists tail off in September, but that doesn’t mean peace and quiet, because we head south again to the next round of trade fairs, trying to guess what our customers will want and need another six months in the future. We return to winter preparations and promotions, culminating in a few mad weeks in the run up to Christmas.
And then it starts all over again.
With minor variations depending on which goods they sell and where they buy them, that was the routine for most shopkeepers in Orkney for fifty years. Until 2020.
Looking back on buying trips at the start of last year brings a painful appreciation of just how much for granted we took the ability to jump on a plane or train, zoom around vast exhibition centres thronged with hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of other retailers. Didn’t we worry about coronaviruses, social distancing and sanitising procedures in the SECC or Olympia? No, we’d never even heard of such things.
Trade fairs are not glamorous. Your feet hurt after trawling aisles as long as Carness Road all day. Nine-tenths of what you look at is unexciting, or overpriced, or has already been bought by another shop along the street.
It’s all a bit tedious – or at least it was, right up to the day we couldn’t do it any more. Now, sitting in the office looking at supplier brochures and websites, the idea of walking around an airless hanger near Birmingham airport seems impossibly exciting.
We heard the phrase ‘the new normal’ a lot in 2020. The truth is, no ‘normal’ had time to emerge last year, and it still hasn’t. Everything changed so quickly – in and out of lockdown, up and down levels of restrictions, furlough schemes introduced, phased out and phased in again – that no ‘normal’, new or otherwise, could become established.
Businesses and customers alike were improvising from day to day, making the best decisions they could based on the advice and information available to them at that moment. Shopkeepers could find one week unexpectedly busy, and the next painfully quiet.
So what of 2021? Will we see the return of predictable patterns? It seems very unlikely, though there are a few near certainties.
Vaccinations will be rolled out in increasing numbers this spring, but whether to all of us or just a few lucky folk – if being more vulnerable can be classed as lucky – remains to be seen.
Tourists won’t return in the numbers of recent years, and the money they spend – estimated at £76 million in 2019 – won’t flow into Orkney’s economy, leaving hundreds worse off.
Will we go up to Level 4 later this month, or down to where we were just a few weeks ago? Most likely we will step up and down until at least the summer, in a way that makes firm planning of anything almost impossible.
Great social events that punctuate the Orkney calendar – Shopping Week, County Show, the Ba – will have to be thought through in every respect before they can even consider going ahead in 2021.
The same goes for Kirkwall BID’s programme of events. Spring Fling in early April looks like it might not be possible. How about the Halloween Parade and Festive Fun Days? It would be great if they could be revived in person and down the street after shifting online in 2020. But only time will tell.
And then there’s Brexit. It will happen – it has happened! – but what effect it will have on us is almost entirely unknown.
The old regular, predictable routines won’t apply for shopkeepers and their customers in 2021. Once again, we will be improvising from day to day and month to month. Which is not all bad. At least it gives us the chance to try new approaches, new products, new ways of talking to each other.
At the start of this new year, the prospect of all that newness seems both appropriate and welcome. So my shopkeeper’s resolution for 2021 is, let’s not lament the old ways, but embrace the new.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 7th January. Other diaries continue to appear weekly. I am posting them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations., and occasional small corrections or additions.