Can small independent shops still cater for all budgets?

I have a fondness for small businesses, especially those with history, a few generations behind them and plying a trade rendered increasingly niche in a shortcut-heavy world. There’s much to admire about an established offering thriving despite the many challenges independent businesses face. It is an appreciation that’s grown the longer I’ve spent chronicling their fortunes.

I’m also reminded that many of the independent businesses I’ve written about have a good story to tell which can fuel a rose-tinted view with certain expectations about the broader sector. As a punter, the reality can be more variable. “Buy small, buy local” is a pretty ingrained mantra these days, an automatic shoo-in for superior quality and service. But I’m less sure. At times it seems like we’re told so often we must support them that we forget to be a bit more discerning.

Once in a while, a bit like those awful tearooms with overpriced food and dirty tables but heaving with captive customers because of the idyllic location, consumer goodwill isn’t always rewarded. I was reminded of this recently when buying a flower bouquet for my mother’s birthday.

I headed on autopilot to my local florist with its attractive outside displays and window framing garlands. I knew without any real investigation that it would be more expensive than other options but this sort of purchase isn’t about price comparisons, is it? It’s all the little extras that come with the small independent experience: the anticipated quality of the blooms, the generous service and personal touches that would be absent when tossing a pre-packed bunch from the supermarket in the basket before self-scanning.

The first sign that things were not going to follow the script came when I discovered just how expensive the flowers were, with very few of the bouquets already made up under £60. Then came the visible drop in the assistant’s face when I confirmed my budget. Naively or not, I thought £25 could still buy me an adequate bouquet – spending much more seems unnecessary when the shelf life is so short. She began to carefully pluck single stems from a few buckets, ignoring my optimistic suggestion to include a hyacinth which I discovered were £9 a stem. She was now holding six flowers and walking off to the area to assemble them – that was apparently all my budget reached. I asked feebly if it could be bulked up with some filler flowers, now feeling tight and unwelcome.

To break the silence as she worked on the “display”, I made small talk. I got little response and the conversation was over before it began as a card machine was thrust at me followed by the sparsest of bouquets which the addition of a bit of extra greenery had failed to elevate. It felt puny and disappointing. Two days later, the leaves began to die; four days later, the edges of the tulips were crisping, and on day five the whole bunch have given up. My mother complained via email with accompanying images as evidence and I wondered what really had been my reward for choosing small and local over a cheaper online or supermarket option. Value? No. Quality? Not really. Service? Definitely not.

This is where things take an even more disappointing turn. I once wrote a whitepaper with Sheffield Hallam University’s business school based on its research exploring what constitutes excellence in customer service across several sectors and scenarios. A common theme among respondents was “an appreciation of swift and responsive action to an issue that showed good understanding of the customer’s needs – notably small things and the unexpected extras”. Nearly 50 per cent of the statements described excellent service as being about problem handling, with a poor and ineffectual response a key determinant when perceiving service as bad. Interestingly, the study found that a poor or indifferent service alone isn’t necessarily the death knell of an offering – what really matters is how a business responds to a complaint. If it goes the extra mile in making amends, then that is the gesture it will be remembered for and can remedy much of what has gone before and merit further visits.

So, in theory, when the florist replied a couple of minutes after my mother sent her email offering to replace the bouquet, I was thinking this could be one of those gestures to turn it all around. My mother was equally optimistic, even entertaining ideas of something more expansive to compensate for the earlier disappointment. But it wasn’t to be. She was given five replacement stems that no vase would ever be small enough to display properly and had to make a detour to the Co-op to buy an additional bunch of flowers so she had something more substantial.

It is telling of a failure on the part of the small business to better cater to different budgets. For so long, independent shops have attracted the more discerning buyer disinclined to follow the herds to big brands and seek out something more personal instead. But there’s an irony to my florist incident: on reflection, I ended up following a herd that had simply migrated elsewhere when the reality of small businesses don’t always live up to the hype.