“Small commerce is the lifeblood of neighborhoods,” read a graffiti next to the workshop of Alexandra Cánovas and Martaé Martínez. They have a small clothing and accessories brand (Las Culpass) that offers their creations. online and who, until recently, sold them in the place where they were produced, in the La Fama neighborhood of Murcia. Although they agreed with the graffiti, after the pandemic they decided not to open every day, and were clear that “public opening hours are a thing of the past”. So Las Culpass only opens as a shop once a month: “It’s when we give our clientele the trouble of letting them know we’re having an open house for some reason, like a launch or event,” they explain.
Your case is no exception. The British media reflected on the drop in prices high streets: those long streets, full of shops and pubwhich animated the social and commercial (or magical, in the case of Vicolo Diagón) life of each town or neighborhood. In the United States, voices emerge, such as that of the architect and critic Alexandra Lange, who propose finding alternative uses for those large shopping centers imitated throughout the world, but which are no longer attractive to their original users: the inhabitants of the suburbs.
In Spain, nearly 50,000 small businesses have closed in the last five years, according to a report published in July on the shopping habits of Spaniards by the BBVA Foundation and the Valencian Institute for Economic Research (Ivie). The specialists are clear: all these phenomena – which occur both in the city and in the suburbs, and from which both international brand shops and those belonging to self-employed workers suffer, on a different scale – are part of what they have called “the apocalypse of see in detail“(retail apocalypse), a process that began with the disclosure of sales channels online and this has accelerated since the pandemic.
Before warnings were issued about the algorithmic homogenization of tastes and products, philosophers like Santiago Alba Rico were already warning that the symptom of our time is not so much consumerism as indifference, even towards the things we consume. As he wrote in Capitalism and nihilism (AKAL, 2007), ours is “the first society in history that has inscribed within it, at the same time, the preservation of all inequalities and the elimination of all differences”. This process affects both the objects we binge on (“global hunger eats everything: men, animals, appliances, houses and books,” says Rico) and the spaces that sell them. Recently, Juan José Millás noticed that mannequins have lost their faces and Elon Musk followed the same logic for the distribution of Tesla cars.
If it is normal for a car manufacturer to distribute its products through dealers, who act as intermediaries and offer, after a small negotiation with the seller, the final price of the car, Musk wanted to simplify the process, eliminate the differences between dealers and allow the purchase of a 50,000 euro Tesla in a couple of clicks. In this way the car is put on a par with any other product available online.
What were the shops for?
Although they occupy five volumes, very few moments of joy appear in the volumes. Autobiographical writings by Thomas Bernhard (Anagram). In fact, most focus on The basementthe book that the Austrian writer dedicates to recounting his experience as an employee of Mr. Podlaha in a grocery store. Of this skilled trader Bernhard observes that “he assumed the role of psychologist and neurologist, gave advice and medicine, and very often prevented individual or entire family catastrophes”. “From him I learned how to behave with people like no one else,” says the Austrian.
The writer Mercedes Cebrián published Dear customers (Siruela, 2025), an essay on the things that, like Bernhard’s learning, we will miss when everything is done through the Internet. “I don’t blame those who buy online. This book is not a complaint”, clarifies the author, but highlights “the enthusiasm and desire of which until recently the shops were suppliers”. “It’s something that also happened to Madame Bovary, who didn’t live in a big city and had to go to the fabric merchant who brought her fabric from Paris”, underlines the writer, who remembers times when shopping was more exciting and “it gave the opportunity to dream of things you didn’t expect and, indeed, to learn the names of those things by seeing them”.
But if we start to clarify everything that is disappearing, beyond the pandemic and the increase in onlinewe know what other factors favored this apocalypse see in detail? “Urban speculation, gentrification (because a tourist will hardly need a hardware store), tourism (with shops moving away from their neighbors because they have become other businesses, and the few remaining resort to platforms) online) and the change in habits (there is a propensity towards what is easy and fast)”, summarizes Carlota López Aza, professor of Marketing at the Complutense University of Madrid. “It was not just the pandemic, many sectors have shaped consumer behavior (thanks to convenience, costs, accessibility, operational efficiency, inventory reduction and logistics optimization or omnichannel strategy) towards digital operations. For example: banks, stores such as Adidas, Nike, Ikea or Maisons du Monde, which physically have only a few units of the new collection and for the rest of the products the only option is to buy online; or establishments like El Corte Inglés that have digital-only promotions.”
López confirms that shopping centers are no longer fashionable because they represent “a very generic experience, which no longer differentiates and no longer satisfies that function of social leisure”, but underlines that “in small cities the closure of local businesses is even more pronounced and presents some specific problems: small businesses depend on a much more limited clientele than in large cities”. Cebrián underlines that, in addition to these factors, consumers’ lack of time also has a lot to do with the change in their habits: “The amount of time we have and how we measure it seems to me to be the great theme of literature or philosophy and for this reason it is also current”, comments the writer. “Time is fundamental, it is what makes us go to the supermarket to buy packaged goods and only very elderly or privileged people, who have more free time, go to the fishmonger and can afford to wait, see who takes the time… The fishmonger, in the end, is a professional who serves you alone and this is a luxury”, he explains.
Why are they so important for cities?
in his book Build and live (Anagrama, 2018), the American sociologist Richard Sennet talks about the characteristics of the “open city”. For him, an open city is a synchronous space, where many social activities take place simultaneously. It is a definition that will also be signed by the urban planner Jane Jacobs, according to which for a street to “work” and offer safety it is necessary for there to be people, continuously, carrying out very different tasks at the same time (going shopping, going to work, playing sports or playing with the children…). Sennet insists on the fact that commerce (both formal and informal, starting from an improvised stall) is the urban use that most contributes to building that open city and aims to protect it. Of course, he acknowledges that it will be a complicated struggle, not so much because of changing consumer demands, but because “the global city today represents an international network of money and power, difficult to address at the local level.”
So is it possible to do something or can we just certify the disappearance of the small business (and the assets) it guards? The Marketing professor is not entirely pessimistic and assures that, with some innovations, there may be space for both in-person and virtual commerce: «The factors that generate satisfaction differ depending on the channel. In in-person shopping, elements such as sensory experience (being able to touch, smell or taste), personal interaction, quality of service, physical evaluation of things and immediacy in obtaining them contribute significantly to customer satisfaction. In purchasing, on the contrary, onlinefactors such as the convenience of purchasing when and where you want, the perceived quality of the website and user experience, trust in the brand or platform, the speed of delivery and the ease of returns are determining factors for satisfaction.” Furthermore, “generation Z does not distinguish between the use of the channel online and offline carry out your own purchasing process, therefore the more cohesive and integrated the two channels are, the easier it will be to retain that type of customer”, indicates the professor.
For many decades the counter of any shop and the counter of any bar were privileged observation points from which it was possible to observe the life of towns and cities. Contact with other clients, possible negotiations or bargaining, spontaneous conversations and other small daily conflicts enriched our experience, prepared us to manage diversity and built “weak ties”. So the question is whether all these experiences will survive in places where not as many transactions occur. López is convinced so and that, moreover, new relationships can emerge between brands and between citizens: “Physical stores in many cases cease to be places of transactions and focus on offering experiences to increase traffic to the point of sale with workshops, product launches, tastings, cultural events, pop-ups or even more package pickups than physical purchases. It may seem that this is only available to big brands, but small venues can organize micro-experiences: from a tasting in a small wine bar, a coffee tasting or a small party with a DJ in a clothing store.”
The Culpasses, who have already traveled this path, are very clear that they will no longer raise the shutters every day. “It hasn’t been financially rewarding, as our physical sales would have been 20% before and now they’re less than 5% (the ones we do on opening days or when someone asks if we’re there). We’ve gained experience and neighborhood gossip, but little money.” Without rigid working hours, they found a workable model. Maybe they had no alternatives, but what they do now, concentrated on their workshop and some presentations, fashion shows and events, is not worse than before, but different (and this ability to adapt is another of the constants of urban life).
