Because of the Coronavirus, a lot of jobs have been lost, mostly because of a lack of customers. This means that the hospitality and retail industries have been hit most hard, as well as startups that rely heavily on investors. Fortunately, some industries have had huge success, such as technology brands like Zoom, which people now use as a COVID-safe version of face to face meetings. Some have been able to avoid disaster by finding alternatives to what they would have been doing, such as online ordering for particular shops in the retail industry. However, some do not have that option, such as smaller shops and markets. In my neighborhood, we have Tachbrook Street Market, which does not seem to be doing all too well.
Before the pandemic, Tachbrook Market was full to the brim with bustling people, but now it is empty, the only people there being the few stalls that have been saved. Of course, some stall owners have said that they have about the same number of people as usual, but some have said that they have lost a lot of business. Looking around, you can see that it is fairly deserted, so one would have to agree with the latter assessment. As mentioned before, markets lost a lot of profits because they didn’t have any way of selling during the lockdown, which is why when you look today, there are a lot fewer stalls than before, as they just don’t have enough money to reopen. There was only one stall to stay open during the lockdown, and they were fairly confident about their future. The rest, however, not so much.
The effect on big stores like Waitrose was not as big, as they still lost a huge number of office workers, but they had their online delivery systems as cover. People now are still anxious about shopping, the majority of the population now using deliveries from big corporations, but there are also those who go to the market, and are not tempted to change. The stall owners have described their customers as “unique” and “loyal”, and they do not think that their sales are affected by the big stores nearby, and while I may have agreed with that assessment before, in these times most people will be switching to online deliveries, which means that Tachbrook Street Market is in decline, and may not surge again for a while.
In conclusion, because of the pandemic, not just Tachbrook Street Market but all markets and small shops are beginning to go down. There are a fair amount of industries that have had to make compromises, but they have all managed to reopen or at least survive with people working from home. The hospitality industry has no way of working from home, so people did not make enough income and ended up losing more than they were making, and could not reopen. Politicians have promised that the world will go back to normal by 2021, but will it really? It will take a long time for a vaccine to be manufactured, let alone distributed to our population of 67 million people, and even then, how long will it take for people to go shopping, go to restaurants or bars or theatres?
