> "So they say you can’t close. And I think, well, come and spend your money with me instead, then."
You get this all over the small picturesque villages in the UK, people love the idea of village shops and village pubs but few are willing to put any money behind them. Remember my parents remarking that their neighbors where sad the village pub was closing down, my parents thinking its ridiculous because they only see them in there twice a year at best, it's 2 minutes walk up the road. Pub did reopen thankfully, but if you want your village to retain it's soul you have to spend your money there.
I saw this a while ago with a startup I was working for, we did online grocery delivery for butchers, bakers, greengrocers and the like. Eventually we had to shut down because we ran out of money, but we did one final week of deliveries - that week was the biggest week we ever did, and the first to make a profit, if all the people saying how sad they were to see us go and making one last order had just used us instead of a supermarket every other week we’d still be delivering.
Another part of the equation is that in many places the threshold for "viable business" has shifted upwards a lot. It's not just increased rents, also what people expect from life in a very general way. (see also other parts about viable business that close simply because they don't find a successor)
You get this all over the small picturesque villages in the UK, people love the idea of village shops and village pubs but few are willing to put any money behind them. Remember my parents remarking that their neighbors where sad the village pub was closing down, my parents thinking its ridiculous because they only see them in there twice a year at best, it's 2 minutes walk up the road. Pub did reopen thankfully, but if you want your village to retain it's soul you have to spend your money there.