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30 days of social enterprise shopping

So after 30 days of solely purchasing from social enterprise what have I learnt about the sector and about myself as a consumer?

Well I have purchased from 21 different social enterprises which is less than I had intended or envisioned although it has been a busy month at work and home. I am not sure exactly how much I spent but it is certainly less than in a normal month. My lifestyle has changed in two major ways, firstly as my choice of outlets has been restricted I needed to think more about what I was buying and due to the major transport limitations I have now started to cycle much more frequently.

The challenge was to see whether it is possible to purchase exclusively from social enterprise for a month and indeed it is. The areas where the major difficulty arises is transport, if you don’t drive you are basically limited to the distance you can walk or ride. Public transport is really an anachronism in this context and the values of what people would like from public transport and the values of social enterprise are I believed closely aligned and a major area of growth that social entrepreneurs and existing social enterprises need to expand into. I am delighted at the plans in this area with Go Co-operative raising finance for bus and train franchises and Community Transport moving into the mainstream, the recent success of HCT in gaining bus routes in Hull being one example.

Another gap in our region is the bar, pub and restaurant sector with no real social enterprise restaurants and just a few bars or pubs. Restaurants offer a real opportunity as the Hoxton Apprentice and Fifteen have shown, the market is very competitive in the current climate but the existing models and USP of such ventures surely means we will see a growth in the sector as the economy starts to recover. On a personal note, could somebody open a social enterprise fish and chip shop in Leeds or possibly a takeaway attached to a fish and chip restaurant, so if I undertake the challenge again I don’t have my major chip cravings for a whole month!

There are areas where consumers are spoilt for choice and the sector is doing really well, creative industries stands at the top of the list for me. I had cinemas, museums, galleries, arts centres all at my disposal and the ones I have been to are all top quality. The other area is food retail, not only big supermarkets like Co-op, Somerfield and Waitrose but a plethora of small community shops especially in small towns and rural villages. The Green Valley Grocer and Handmade Bakery I visited in Slaithwaite is a great example of small scale artisanal food manufacture alongside food retail owned by and servicing a local community. Surely this is an area of real potential all across the UK in the same way that this sector is dominant in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna with over 8000 food-based co-operatives.

On a personal note, having to think about where I buy things from and therefore what I buy has released me from what I call the tyranny of choice as I didn’t have too think about all the choices and options and didn’t impulse buy (very much). I had more time to do things and to think about what is happening in the community and attend the great range of events that happen locally on a daily basis, rather than buy stuff to underpin our self-worth which unfortunately a lot of our conspicuous consumption is there to do. The value of that consumption is framed in a different way as well knowing that the organisation you purchase from has a social mission and the profit is being re-invested, this doesn’t mean you should accept lower quality but contextualizes the fact that we as individual consumers have a collective power to change the world just with our purchases.