Two weeks ago, after days of compulsive browsing on Google Flights, I managed to get my hands on some cheap plane tickets to Europe.
A godsend, in fact.
I’m not proud of what I did next. I immediately connected to the web giant Amazon to find travel guides, ideally as cheap as possible.
I must have been distracted. The transaction never happened. So much the better: what happened a few hours later was a good call to order.
While walking down Ontario Street East, I stopped at a store that I had passed hundreds of times, without ever paying attention to it. An Alibaba cave, hidden in the field of commercial ruins that the Latin Quarter has become.
I was treated to a trip back in time. End of 1990, beginning of 2000.
In the Four Points of the Cardinal store, there is an entire wall dedicated to terrestrial globes. Big ones, small ones, bright ones, luxurious ones.
Another portion is reserved for geographical maps: there are more than 10,000 of them, from all regions and all the seabeds of the world. We can laminate where the laminate.
There are also travel guides. The same as on Amazon, at a fairly similar price.
PHOTO JOSIE DESMARAIS, THE PRESS
Louis Gobeille, owner of the store Aux quatre points cardinals
I was pleasantly surprised to have to wait in line at the cash register, behind three or four customers, with their arms full. The business climate is far from easy, owner Louis Gobeille told me, but customers continue to come to the store to have an “experience.”
Small businesses like this are jewels that are increasingly under threat.
In Montreal, on Saint-Denis or Sainte-Catherine Est streets, boarded up windows and “For Rent” signs are multiplying.
When a new occupant moves in, at a higher rent than the previous one, it is often a branch of a foreign chain. At the corner of Saint-Denis and Mont-Royal, in what was once the hypercenter of Plateau coolness, three of the four corners of the intersection are now occupied by franchises of fast food : McDonald’s, A & W and Thai Express.
PHOTO JOSIE DESMARAIS, THE PRESS
Fast food outlets are multiplying, like here, at the corner of Saint-Denis and Mont-Royal.
Depressing (and fattening).
Montrealers are still spoiled for choice, despite all the closures.
But almost everywhere in Quebec, in several villages and small municipalities, there is a crisis. The closures add up to the point of transforming entire regions into commercial deserts.
A dramatic situation for the social fabric, beyond the glaring economic impacts.
Data from the Institute of Statistics of Quebec, relayed by The duty, illustrate the scale of the problem. The proportion of municipalities with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants that no longer have any retail businesses doubled between 2006 and 2022.
Yes: doubled!
Out of 458 villages, 95 no longer have a single store, even a convenience store. This is a proportion of 20.7%, compared to 11.6% in 2006. Huge deterioration.
The regions where we find the most towns without any commerce are Bas-Saint-Laurent (17), Estrie (15) and Abitibi-Témiscamingue (13). That’s a lot of people who have to drive miles to get a pint of milk or some Tylenol.
When they have the means, physical or financial.
In a recent open letter to The PressChristian Savard, president of the Rues Principales organization, described the situation as “a slow-motion catastrophe for Quebec communities and their population “.
Read the letter “Local commerce is suffering”
I agree with him 100%.
It sets out concrete means that could be taken by the authorities to alleviate some of the burden on small traders. Help them to be born and above all to survive. Several financial aid and regulatory measures, provincial or municipal, are underused, he notes.
We must also look at our consumption habits, which harm local businesses. And in this regard, I plead guilty.
Even if I already have “my” hardware store, “my” neighborhood pharmacist, “my” baker, I too often turn to the ease of online purchasing platforms or to the savings offered by the big stores of this world . It’s human, it’s logical. Life is expensive, time is short.
Self-flagellation, however, never leads to anything constructive. We also cannot go back and ignore technological advances in consumption.
But we can try to increase the number of small purchases, left and right, to encourage our local merchants – in the towns and neighborhoods where they still exist. Each transaction can make a difference in their often tiny margins.
A difference between their survival and their disappearance.
reference: www.lapresse.ca