Stagnation

The bad news is that no single existing transport, logistics or retail business is able to or even likely to want to make localnet come about. For many of them, their place in such a world is so different as to be unrecognisable. Although the system will work in relatively small pockets, the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. Several independent initiatives, even if they strive for all of the benefits set out here, will not be able to do as good or efficient a job as if a single approach is taken. Ideally, a common global approach should be taken. National initiatives would work but joining them together will be unnecessarily painful. It needs to be like shipping containers – with one global standard agreed early on – rather than most other walks of life, such as the paper this book is published on which will either be a U.S. or a European standard but not both.

A dictatorship or a communist state would have no problem making this vision into reality. It’s somewhat more challenging in any free market economy and exponentially more so on a global scale. Many existing companies will no longer have businesses – or at least not the business they had before.

Local dairies must feed their milk into the hubs rather than deliver it themselves. Their delivery fleets and drivers should find more rewarding employment delivering a wider variety of goods – often at more sociable hours than they have to date.

The same goes for newspaper deliveries. These are often the remit of the local village shop and/or sub Post Office and it is these that are probably most profoundly affected. Many have closed or been taken over by large chains in recent years as their profitability declines and the quality of life enjoyed by their owners becomes less and less attractive in comparison to those with “nine to five” jobs. The amount of red-tape, the difficulty hiring and keeping staff, eroding margins and dwindling volumes as people shop in nearby supermarkets are all already contributing to their decline.

If we do not implement this vision, we will continue to see village shops and post offices close without replacement. Their premises will, in many cases lie empty or revert to what, in many cases, was their original purpose – a residential property in the middle of the village or district.

We need to focus on the services that the village shop and post office provide – or at least used to provide – rather than the ownership and precise physical location of the shop. Instead of looking back to last year before the local shop closed down, we should actually think back thirty or forty years. Then we’d find that there were probably several other businesses in the village or travelled through the village every few days. Most will have had a butcher and baker almost certainly. A fishmonger, a tea room and so on.

The LocalHub of this delivery service really should be the hub of the community– somewhere that residents enjoy visiting. Somewhere that more than just one or two overworked owners and a couple of reluctant shoppers who couldn’t get to the supermarket work, meet, shop, eat and chat.