Our wonderful town is under threat.

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Our wonderful town is under threat.

Postby Hugo » Fri Sep 25, 2009 10:25 pm

Apologies for putting this up here, but the town where Sarah & I have bust a gut to build a good business is about to be strangled by another supermarket.

Wadebridge is a thriving and unique market town, loved for the fact we have no highstreet chain shops but a great selection of traditional butchers, bakers, grocers, newsagents, a winemerchants and a great delicatessen.... as small towns go we're a rarity and cherish our community

Anyone who can take the time to visit this website http://lovewadebridge.com/Welcome.html
and sign the petition and comment, we'd be grateful.

Thank you

Hugo
http://www.relishfoodanddrink.co.uk
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Cornwall
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Postby matisse » Mon Sep 28, 2009 4:15 pm

Done and Done mate.

got a similar thing by us at the mo, they want to build a huge new tesco when we already have a sainsbury and asda within the same square mile.

be down your way again next month, i'll be sure to pop in.

mat
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Postby Jem_Bean » Wed Sep 30, 2009 10:37 am

All done.

Coming from nasty old Peterborough, i think it's such a shame to see the last remaining places like Wadebridge being taken over by the big cheeses (other than the ones in the local deli!)

Best of luck,

J
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Postby JulieJayne » Wed Sep 30, 2009 6:09 pm

Hugo, I have to agree with you it is such a shame to spoil a nice town with another supermarket.

But I was surprised that you were against it when so many people, yourself included took the opposite view in the Moral Dilemma thread recently.

Clearly supermarket=bad, Deli with coffee next to Coffee bar=good.
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Postby Hugo » Wed Sep 30, 2009 10:04 pm

I'm not sure I understand your point. It's decidedly smug and antagonistic and as such I won't be answering it. If you can't see the difference then I can't help you.
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Cornwall
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Postby JulieJayne » Thu Oct 01, 2009 9:44 pm

Sorry Hugo, I didn't mean to upset anyone.

I wholeheartedly support your efforts to keep a giant supermarketout of a small town like Wadebridge.

But in the Moral Dilemma thread, when I tried to maintain the same stance, the general consencus was that "competition was fine".

Now you are suffering from the results of unrestricted competition.

The point is that IMHO there should be a mechanism to prevent Big companies, from buying into a particular town/region/street. Unfortunately there isn't.
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Postby awlred » Fri Oct 02, 2009 6:39 am

The difference is that a single shop is a much smaller threat than a supermarket. Hugo's village is in a high-tourism area and so has a lot of out-of-town business with people who aren't familiar. When they look for somewhere to shop they look for something familiar and a large national supermarket is just that.

If another coffee shop openned up next to Hugo that did better coffee for instance then Hugo would have to raise his game and make it competative. A Supermarket's quality doesn't compare but they can offer prices far below what would be possible for a small opperator to charge and still be viable.
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Postby motoman » Fri Oct 02, 2009 9:44 am

My sympathies Hugo, Bridgnorth, my lovely little market town has similar problems. with more and more houses going up the small shopkeepers can no longer keep up with demand. We still have wonderful butchers, bakers and specialist shops but our local health food shop is dieing from an attack by Julian Graves. Where Woolies used to be is a typical sweat shop factory outlet and Wetherspoons are undercutting our local pubs. I could go on but I may have to kill myself.
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Postby JulieJayne » Fri Oct 02, 2009 9:26 pm

awlred wrote:The difference is that a single shop is a much smaller threat than a supermarket. Hugo's village is in a high-tourism area and so has a lot of out-of-town business with people who aren't familiar. When they look for somewhere to shop they look for something familiar and a large national supermarket is just that.

If another coffee shop openned up next to Hugo that did better coffee for instance then Hugo would have to raise his game and make it competative. A Supermarket's quality doesn't compare but they can offer prices far below what would be possible for a small opperator to charge and still be viable.
Certainly, a single shop is a much smaller threat than a supermarket. But then you get into the question of WHERE do you draw the line.

The reason that I find this such a difficult Moral Dilemma myself is that for 5 years I have been building a business from scratch and 4 months ago a National Chain of coffee shops opened across the road from me. Now do they fit into the "supermarket" category, or is that just "competition".

The only difference that I see is that the supermarket upsets more than one person. But conversely they probably also have more than one supporter.
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Postby awlred » Fri Oct 02, 2009 9:44 pm

The only difference that I see is that the supermarket upsets more than one person. But conversely they probably also have more than one supporter.


I can see your train of thought but I have to disagree.

I think for Hugo's instance a supermarket isn't direct competition, he offers products that a supermarket would rarely stock. The problem occurs when people don't go to the highstreet to shop they go to the supermarket on the outskirts of the town.

Also these people have to work hard to keep their shops open. A supermarket simply doesn't. Reliable mediocraty is the best that people tend to expect, and so is generally all you get and sadly enough, people are willing to accept mediocraty far too often.

I can see the doublestandard between the two threads but there are differences between them aswell as similarities.

The secondary factor is that independant quality-centric coffee shops in the UK are few and far between. The circumstances of the other thread is a deli that also serves coffee from a very talented barista openning next to a solely coffee-shop. People may come to the deli but not want to wait for a coffee and so go next door, for instance. A supermarket doesn't have overflow business, it isn't the way they work.

If a large coffee chain were to open next to Hugo's and offer direct competition then it would fall pretty flat. Hugo's coffee would blow any of the big 3 out of the water, in many ways.

I feel I'm not being as concise as I feel I ought to be, there are many subtletys that differentiate the two circumstances.
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Postby JulieJayne » Fri Oct 02, 2009 9:56 pm

Awlred, you put it wonderfully. But that was my point, clearly not so well made... sorry. There are subtletys in these questions, always.

I was, am in agreement with Hugo against the Supermarket. I have seen too many of them, cause too much damage in the UK and here in the Netherlands.

But I am also against any "rich business" buying itself into a market. However that is competition and I don't see many people campaigning against such competition in general.

Anyway... nuf sed. Good Luck Hugo and Wadebridge. If I was in the UK I would sign the petition.
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Postby ianboughton » Mon Oct 05, 2009 10:12 am

I'm thoroughly hacked off with the way that lovely little market towns are being destroyed. We moved down to the south-west from a historic little town in Oxfordshire which now has every major supermarket within a 500-yard walk and is building housing estates at 2,000 homes a time.
I'm with Wadebridge, every time, for the reasons Hugo describes in the initial posting.
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Postby GMRK » Thu Oct 15, 2009 2:21 pm

I was going to post a public thanks to Hugo in the Members Clubroom area but I'll use this thread instead:

My partner and I spent a week down in Cornwall a few weeks ago and Hugo mailed me with a list of things to see and do while we there after I PMd him here on TMC.

We had a few plans of our own including visiting Relish but without Hugo's advice we would've missed out on lunch at Margot's in Padstow which was simply excellent:

http://margotspadstow.blogspot.com/

We spent a bit of time in Wadebridge earlier in the week cycling the Camel trail but didn't make it into Relish to introduce ourselves until near the end of our week.

Relish is a really nice place and although we saw it at a quiet moment late in the afternoon it had a very welcoming feel to it and we were treated to impeccable espressos and slices of brownie by Hugo himself.

Wadebridge had a nice laid-back feel to it and seemed less touristy than some of the other towns we visited, we only spent a short time there but we'll be thinking of visiting again at some point.

I'll sign the petition as it'd be a shame to see another place homogenised and local businesses forced out of contention, but we did take advantage of LIDL's car park for some free parking when we visited Relish(!).

Hugo - many thanks for the pre-visit advice and the welcome when we saw you, apologies if I didn't get too 'geeky' with you (or geeky enough) over the new blend which you were obviously excited about but you understand I was with a non-coffeegeek (although Kate's response to your espresso was to ask why mine weren't this good...):)

Remember to drop me a line if you're in or around London so I can return the hospitality if possible...
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