The Ballad of Ballards Lane

I live just off Ballards Lane, a suburban high street in north west London. It comprises a range of small, and a few larger, shops serving the local residents and commuters. Most 'serious' family shopping is done, at least by those with cars, at the giant supermarkets and shopping centres on the nearby North Circular Road. The smaller shops come and go with great rapidity and the shop fitters appear regularly, making-over the shops for the next occupants. New and ever more garish shop signs appear, only to last months or in some cases weeks. A few established specialist stores keep going but even a couple of those have become casualties with the shutters going down for the final time. The vacant spaces are occupied temporarily by charity shops, hardy convenience stores and new ventures by fresh and optimistic entrepreneurs defying the prevailing economic outlook.

I watch the shops with interest, in particular it is interesting to look at the failures and speculate on the causes. Some are pretty obvious, for instance the combined shoe repairer, photo developer, key cutter and dry cleaner that opened with an established photo developer and dry cleaners on either side and a key cutter and shoe repairer opposite. What possessed the owners is still unclear to me. The very best outcome was that they would cut each others throat. As it was the new 'combo' service disappeared within weeks.

Usually however, the best indicator of a shop that is failing are the signs posted in window. A couple of examples may serve to illustrate this. The fishmonger on the high street did not long survive the local Tesco setting up a fresh fish counter. Signs, and at one point a blackboard, appeared: 'Tesco is putting small shops out of business', 'Boycott Tesco', 'Keep your local fishmonger', and so on. At no point did any sign appear that said 'fresher fish', 'better service than Tesco', 'Get your fish recipes here!' or whatever. It was all the fault of Tesco and, by implication, the lazy customer, read me, for failing the business.

I miss the high street bookshop more. My cravings for books being more urgent than those for tilapia. Each evening the bookshop, placed adjacent to a busy bus stop, and closed before commuters returned, would cover the window display of books with a thick dust sheet. On one occasion I asked the proprietor why. The books would get dusty and possibly faded, he said, and the display would then need to be changed. I did not reply. Shortly after this, a sign appeared, posted on the door of the shop. 'If you want to order a book we require a deposit of £10 because customers have not been returning to collect their orders'. This sign, roughly translated, read. 'We do not have a large stock. We do not trust you. Orders take a long time to arrive and you may lose patience and get the book elsewhere.' No more effective sign could have been designed unless it actually said 'Please buy your books from Amazon'. Even if you felt commercially bound to charge a deposit on orders, why on the front door? It was no surprise then when the shop closed.

Sudden rashes of entrepreneurial energy capture the high street. For a short time every other shop had outside a bunch of disconsolate and ill-shaven men who sold fruit in plastic bowls off trestle tables. It seems not to have caught on and the entire venture has ceased as suddenly and as collectively as it appeared. The sellers of the plastic bowls themselves have perhaps taken a more permanent hold, the local demand for household plastic goods appears to be larger and more durable than I had appreciated.

What astonishes me most however, is the extent to which the shops follow a template. Each household goods shop, each Turkish barbecue restaurant (of which, oddly, there are many), each local pharmacy, each convenience store offers exactly the same range of goods and services. Now some of this is surely driven by customer demand and expectations, the top 25 convenience store items are likely to be the same in each case, and the clustering is partially explicable by larger patterns of demand. Why however, do none of the stores try to break the mould - cheaper goods, more expensive goods, better service, different advertising, alternative displays, campaigns, special offers, loyalty cards? But no, even those shops that, on arrival, exhibited some interesting and attractive differences appear driven towards uniformity. I am sure that some of this is explicable in purely economic terms but I cannot help feeling there is a strong sociological element to it too.

I could continue but your interest in suburban shopping, if ever present, is no doubt fading. So, to the point. The working out of the dynamic commercial ecology contains, I contend, many valuable messages on business, management and strategy. On occasions I am inclined to ponder the similarities in behaviour of the local shop keepers and universities: the failure to appreciate or to take account of the competitive environment; the unconscious orientation to the interests of the suppliers rather than the customers; the sudden fads; the cookie-cutter strategies; the risk aversion to the point, in fact, of added risk. All these seem very familiar, perhaps they are constants of the 'business world' but the similarities are sufficiently striking to give, me at least, pause for reflection.