It’s wonderful to see The Heatons so busy: the shops bustling with customers again and the bars and restaurants busy with drinkers and diners in the early summer sun. It’s been tough, and will continue to be so for a while, but with more of us working from home at least some of the time, hopefully that will impact on how supportive we are able to be of our local traders.
The flip side of being home based is that a lot of us, and I hold my hand up here, have got very used to using a certain online retailer. As someone whose job it is to encourage you to shop locally, you can only imagine my guilt for supporting such a service and the difficulty in confessing it to you, but honestly this particular company helped get me through lockdown! So now, I have set myself a challenge. I am having ‘dry’ June and July when I don’t buy a single thing online. For some of you this won’t seem at all difficult, but my habit has got so bad that for me this is worse than giving up wine in January! I have decided the only way is to go completely cold turkey, so I’ll not be receiving any telltale brown cardboard packages in the post, or buying birthday cards online that I don’t even sign by hand (you know the ones I mean), or even using my favourite ‘cook at home’ meal delivery service. Nothing is wrong with any of these companies, but they don’t help our local businesses or encourage new ones to take on our empty shops. I would hate to see any more local companies fail and I love it when an empty retail or business space is filled. Giving up my guilty addiction and putting a bit more effort into my purchases locally seems a small price to pay to keep our area vibrant and thriving economically.
So, the message remains the same: enjoy The Heatons to the full whether you live or work here, making use of local services, retailers and businesses whenever you can. And that includes all the rather less obvious ones like accountants and solicitors, printers, designers, engineers, surveyors and of course all the trades.
From Melissa (Editor) & the whole of the Moor Team