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Brick No148: Keep Your Town Weird
By Matt Weston, Thursday 9 June 2005 Attack Of The Clone Towns Late last August, the insistently lower-case new economics foundation - or nef for short - asked people to do this: ** (a) Walk along your local High St, or whatever ** passes for your local High St. ** (b) Record the first 50 shops you pass (you can ** start at any point on the High St). Don't count ** post offices, banks, benefit offices, job ** centres and the like. ** (c) For each independently owned shop, score 50 ** points. For each chain store, say Millets, M&S, ** or Starbucks, give 5 points. Oh, and for each ** different type of shop, score an extra 5 points. ** (d) Lastly, to get a kind of average, divide the ** total by the number of shops counted, i.e. 50. Anyway, the results are in. And lo! It turns out Britain's high streets are very samey. In fact - in the words of nef - 42% of our towns are effectively "clone towns". And another 26% are "under threat" of going the same way. (A town has to score 25 or below to be reported a "clone".) We are living, apparently, in "Clone Town Britain" - with Exeter as its capital. And your town is next. Read the full results here. Or play spot the difference with the BBC. I guess they did the research, so they're entitled to draw their own conclusions. But the policy wonks at nef seem to think that the main way to repel this "attack of the clones" is to lobby: sweet-talk deputy-PM Prescott into tightening local council control; get town planners to place a stop on new takeovers of small stores by the supermarkets; and chivvy the Competition Commission into forcing big retailers to limit assets to 8 per cent of the market. It (lobbying) won't work. Pols and paper pushers simply don't have the short-term self-interest to listen. Nope, if the nef really want change, they need to rally, not lobby. Rally the people most directly hit by all this - namely small retailers. If you check out only one link today, make it this one. Keep Louisville Weird 18 months ago, residents in Louisville, Ky. - a city roughly the size of Nottingham - started noticing stark black & white, courier font-face billboards dotted all over the place. They read, simply: "Keep Louisville Weird". And then there were T-shirts. And bus cards. And stickers. The official story behind the KLW motto didn't come out until almost a year later (about 6 months ago). By then, the media couldn't wait to cover it. The billboards were placed by an informal coalition of independent Louisville businesses - a protest at starbucksification, sparked by the sale of Hawley-Cooke, Louisville's largest independent bookstore, to Borders on 18 August 2003. They borrowed the "Keep My Town Weird" idea from a similar slogan on car bumpers in Austin. If you click the "Oliver's Army" link on the KLW website (link above), you'll see the coalition now numbers over 110 indies: from Lynn's Paradise Cafe to Cinderblock Gallery to Louisville Billiard Bar Stools. If you're a independent retailer, you shouldn't wait for the government to intervene. Instead, rally other local small business owners. Start a campaign, help each other, and patronise other independents. Independents Day A few closing thoughts: (1) If I ran nef, this is what I'd do - I'd spend zero energy lobbying politicians, and all my energy rallying small, independent retailers to set up "Keep My Town Weird" groups. (2) "Weird" used to be a negative word. But this changes the language. It's a far more meaningful word to use than "different", or the overused "unique". And compared with "samey" it's glaringly positive. (3) Brickies Are Weirdos. I hope this isn't my Ratner moment, but everyone who has donated to Business Bricks is a Weirdo - I defy you to find a more diverse set of independent retailers than the 187 Brickies listed in 46 categories. If you do one thing today, become a Weirdo, (sorry Brickie). Bric-A-Brac Miscellany on today's Brick: (1) If you liked "Keep Louisville Weird", you'll probably like this raleighunchained.org (2) A couple of readers new to this list wanted to know what the links that start with snipurl.com mean. They're just shortened versions of very long links. It's all explained here. (3) I've written about clones before http://www.businessbricks.co.uk/brick97.shtml And more miscellany on last week's Brick, "How To Have A Number One Record The Easy Way": (4) This from Neelesh Sonawane: " On 2/6/05 17:25, "matt weston" wrote: ** Take this quote for example: "Having no money ** sharpens the wits. [It] forces you never to make ** the wrong decision." This point seems rather poignant considering when [the KLF] did have a million squid, they burnt it!" (5) A couple of you had first-hand stories about the KLF. Sharon Stilesedited some of their videos; and Dan Thompson is hosting a festival that includes an evening with Bill Drummond in Worthing. Remember to sign up: back to top |
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