Mom-and-pop business scheme

ECONOMICAL TRADING OUTLETS – Retailing just might be the smallest of the economic bunch. If one wants to look at what’s really fueling an inexpensive consumer economy, in Toronto, Canada for example, just drive over on any given day to the city’s busy thoroughfares and commercial areas such as Yonge Street, King Avenue, Dundas Street east and west, Spadina Avenue and Queen Street east and west. Actually, it doesn’t matter wherever you go in Toronto since the cost-effective business scheme is very visible.
There are plenty of small-scale stores that dotted the different eventful streets of Toronto, and probably throughout Canada, so if you go shopping or looking for reasonable food items, chances are good that you’ll find yourself in a place like antique shops, variety stores, corner café joints, bakery and pastry shops, fast-food centers, cheese stores, pet accessory shops, beautyparlors, book shops among others.
While Chinese small entrepreneurs dominated the mini-convenience and grocery stores and wet market business, and their Indian counterparts leading the low-cost consumer-based products merchandizing scheme, all I can say based on my observation is that the line of businesses I’ve mentioned undoubtedly are “traditionally” Canadian.
Certainly, in purely economic term, this mode and manner of business – low-margin trading venture is pleasing and astonishing for middle-class and low-income bracket consumers and good for the economy therefore the locals who thrived in this kind of long-established business rightly deserve the reputation for being conscientious.
Many of these stores couldn’t be more picturesque with worn wooden floors and shelves. In all, it seems like a quaint harmless slice of the colonial era. But fair enough, the prices are quite reasonable because the retail outlets are built into the way small independent retailing works. However, it can’t match the product selection, service, buying power and merchandizing savvy of large-format convenience store chains.
Even in other advanced and industrialized countries typical retailers or the so-called mom-and-pop shops are niche operators making up, for example, a large portion of retail employment. They are, as a matter of fact, still the way the nation sold things. And they are wonderfully productive generating a big percentage of the output of the average Canadian retail store.
The brighter outlook is largely due to the fact that affordable prices and high consumer satisfaction average Canadian consumers encounter everyday has spurred a never-ending cycle of increased demand and high growth. As much as the local citizens value tradition, the small-scale and low-margin retailing outlets have survived by being flexible even when that meant that stakes are high and the economy striving.
Most of Toronto’s old-fashioned and low-cost retailing business, the same as in other parts of Canada and perhaps throughout North America are run by mom-and-pop operations and believe to have emanated from anthills of small adroit family shops. The traditional trading practices have to be patterned on what is generally accepted by the middle-class and low-budget consumers.
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CANDID SHOTS –The closer to the people government is, the more responsive it becomes to their needs, hopes and wants. Unfortunately, our local government units (LGUs) – the ones closest to the people have very limited powers. Sadly of course, the bulk of power is concentrated in the sectoral or line agencies, which are run by non-elective Manila-based functionaries with little empathy with ordinary Filipinos.
It is high time that the swivel of political power shifted away from Imperial Manila to our LGUs. The leadership must peel away the layers of bureaucracy and learn to trust its area managers. If we give them power to lead, they will, by sheer necessity, try to measure up to people’s expectations.