260. CHRISTMAS SHOPPING - In Defence of Chainstores
“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chainstores”
— Dermot O’Keeffe
I returned to Cardiff this weekend for the first time in over a year. Having lived there between 2001 and 2008 I still can’t quite get over how changed the city is with the addition of the new St David’s Centre (“new” being, of course, deeply subjective considering the place has been there now for over fifteen years). So many familiar high street chains that either seemed unlikely to ever come to Cardiff when I left the city, or didn’t yet exist.
To be fair, the same could be said of my home city of Birmingham. When the “new” Bullring came, the city felt fresh and new, and it continues to attract new businesses even if it couldn’t sustain the mammoth yet impractical John Lewis that once stood at the heart of its revivified “Grand Central” offering at New Street Station. Likewise, in nearby Solihull, where John Lewis continues to survive, the town’s Touchwood shopping centre was still being built when I left for Cardiff at the turn of the century. Walking through the town centre today, my childhood self wouldn’t recognise it. Except for the McDonalds, still standing in the very same spot where a pre-boycott and anti-corporate young me used to excitedly get his Happy Meals.
It’s often been said that the corporate gentrification of cities and towns, not only across the UK but across the whole world, has made travel dull and boring. Whether you’re in Birmingham, Cardiff, London, New York, Paris, Stockholm, or anywhere else in the globe, the preponderance of the same old corporate chainstores everywhere has made one location pretty much like any other. The question is no longer is there an Apple Store, but where is it?
And like many, it used to make me sad. Corporate always meant bad to a kid growing up in the anti-capitalist punk rock 1990s. “Selling out” when you should have gone indie. I bought all my records at Tempest in Birmingham, and, when I moved to Cardiff, Spillers. Chains like HMV were only good for ripping off. Buying one CD, copying it onto tape, then returning it the next week in exchange for something else. Two for the price of one. And it served them right for being “the man”. Not for me the clothes shops with the expensive branded clothes; there were always charity shops and DIY punk bands’ merch tables at gigs. And I’d always rather a second-hand book than one bought from a chain.
But as I grew older, I grew lazier in my consumer habits. It still made me sad to see smaller shops pushed out of the high street and replaced with the same old chains you got anywhere, but I also acknowledged that in most cases I myself had stopped using them too, eschewing the physical shop for the ease of the online click.
And worse — in a world where the chainstores kept on coming, both on the high street and on your computer, it became too easy to not only grudgingly use them, but to find exactly what you wanted there. The spread of the same old chains across the globe meant that I could get the exact coffee I liked whether I was in Cardiff, Birmingham, Amsterdam, Ho Chi Minh City, or Las Vegas. I remembered touring Italy as a teenager in my old punk band and rolling my eyes with disdain at the drummer who didn’t want to get lunch from the Italian supermarket and instead bought a McDonalds Big Mac. But then I found myself in my 40s seeking a quick and dependable vegetarian meal at a Swedish train station and heading to the Burger King.
I always kind of hated myself when I saw myself doing that stuff. “Selling out”. Betraying the ideals of my younger self and becoming too accepting of the rampage of monopolistic capitalism.
But this weekend, walking through Cardiff and seeing the same chains we have at home in the Midlands, remembering the convenience at a book launch a month ago in Newbridge of knowing the local Greggs would have a vegan sausage roll when I was hungry for lunch in an unfamiliar place, and the strange momentary comfort I once got from seeing a Costa Coffee sign in the middle of a very alien Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I wondered about that self-hatred, and my knee-jerk anger at the world for selling its unique and independent character for a homogenised set of global chainstores.
I wondered why it was that people used to use these independent small businesses and realised that it was ultimately about trust. You used your local butcher because you trusted the quality of their meats, your local grocer because you knew the produce they sold would be good. You went to the local pub because they had what you liked to drink on tap, and went to the little restaurant that was run by the local chef because the food there was good.
It’s certainly, even in the changing 1990s, why I liked the indie record and bookstores: they actually had the strange and obscure stuff I was looking for. Rare imports and DIY releases. I could trust that the weird thing I wanted would be there.
Cut to 2025 and we live in a far less local and far more globalised world. We no longer are limited to the handful of businesses which happen to exist in our local geographic area and frequently travel well beyond the borders of our hometowns, even our home countries. If I want good quality meat, groceries, drink, food, books, records, or whatever, then I can no longer gain that knowledge of quality from the slow and organic approach of the olden days: getting to know your local businesses through word of mouth and hard-earned experience. What I can do is establish that experience at home of the chain stores I think offer the best quality, the chain stores that I trust, and then, when I am in another town or country, find that chain. The brand becomes the trusted butcher, grocer, bar, restaurant, bookshop, music store, not the random individual who runs it.
Growing up there was a hardware store in my village, named after its owner. He had everything anyone would need in terms of hardware, and a visit to his shop always meant you got what you needed and you’d get about half an hour of random chat and gossip. A proper old fashioned shopkeeper, he wore that sort of blue jacket seen in shows like Open All Hours, and knew everything he had on his shelves. It was great. But when I moved away from that village and found myself in a different hardware store, I had no idea what I was looking for and the guy who ran that one knew even less. I soon learned that a place like B&Q or Homebase (back in the day) probably had what I needed in a far more consistent way, and both brands seemed to be everywhere, so wherever I lived in the country, they had what I needed.
Last time I drove through my old village, the hardware store wasn’t there. A Sainsbury’s stands in its place. I used to think it was sad — but is it? Or do chain-stores now serve the same function our familiar, trusted, small, independent, local businesses once did?
The hardware store owner’s chatter used to annoy customers, and I knew someone who once worked there part-time for the summer and was verbally abused by the owner so bad that they quit. The sins of a single small business owner will never match the egregious crimes of the corporate mega-companies in terms of scale, but where one might point to the awful things most huge companies promote, do, or endorse with their profits, I do wonder how much we knew about the people who used to run the smaller independent businesses we used to love and trust? Were they all righteous saints, or did they have their own skeletons in the closet commensurate with their scale?
This is not a defence of capitalism, nor a defence of the current order, but it is a defence of the notion that perhaps the proliferation of corporate chain-stores everywhere, which once made me mourn the quirky individuality of the independent high street, is not necessarily a bad thing. It is not necessarily because people have blindly “sold out”. It is an argument that we are still trading in the same value — trust — on which the old arguments for the smaller, individual, businesses over the faceless corporate entity were made. And that in the modern age perhaps (sad though it may be) we have collectively decided that it is better the devil we know (the familiar chainstore, with all its known faults and known products) than the devil we don’t (whatever this unknown indie is). After all — capitalism corrupts and the aim of all businesses, big or small, is to make profit, not to be morally good. Maybe, therefore, it is merely nostalgia for a different time that makes us think there is something morally superior for engaging in inherently dubious capitalist transactions with a single, independent, scoundrel than it is to make them with a larger, corporate entity? Maybe instead of seeing the proliferation of corporate chains on the high street and across the globe as the end of something we should see it merely as an appropriate evolution, in an increasingly globalised world, of the exact same instinct for trustworthiness and familiarity which once gave worth to the local independent high street? when the whole world gets to share its thoughts on the subject, it is no longer enough for you and the people in your town to trust a provider of goods and services. A trusted global brand will always be more highly recommended.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here. You also should have commented on THIS POST, as the future of this website is currently undecided as I ask myself if it is worth it?
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a brand new short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.
My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book.
I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.
Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my academic paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ in the Journal of Philosophy of Education here. My Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.
For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com