Trustifarian Fannying About, or Actual Heartache?
I get cynical about a lot of things, not least of which is the large number of new shops which seem to open up on certain streets and then inevitably shut down within about six to eight months. Particularly in places like St. Stephen’s Street in Edinburgh there seems to be an endless supply of shitty little tat shops, which open with champagne and strawberries, and to whose opening all sorts of ladies wot lunch totter along to sup on the stairs and congratulate Jocasta or Poppy or whoever the fucking hell it is taking their turn pouring money down the fucking drain this particular quarter.
When I get really cynical, I walk past these shops as they open and think things like ‘what, a shop dedicated to nothing but organic babyfood and bits of wooden shit which only adults think pass for acceptable toys – have you considered any sort of market analysis beyond sitting around at a coffee morning with your fucking braying yahoo friends and everyone telling you how mahhhhvellous it’s going to be? Well? Have you?’ And then the fucking place inevitably goes broke in a few months and I find myself getting incredibly fucked off because what the fucking hell did you think would happen?
It annoys me, more than anything else, because of the sheer waste of it all; all the resources and money that go into ventures so obviously doomed to failure. And then it annoys me because of how often these things seem to be started by Yummy Mummies whose minted partners pay for them to open a little boutique in a sort of condescending, ‘nice job for a girl, but not a serious legal/financial/medical job like a chap would do’ sort of manner or, alternatively, some trustifarian fuckwit who has never really needed the money anyway because Mummy and Daddy are rich enough to fix Haiti if they cared to think about it for a second and if and when the thing bloody fails it’s really no skin off anyone’s nose anyway.
And then I take a deeeeeep breath, make just a little effort to get the damn chip off my shoulder, and try to repress my angry inner anti-privilege instincts.
You see, this kind of thing annoys me in the ways described above because of where I live now. But it used to annoy me for rather different reasons: because of actual, genuine concern. I first started to notice it when I lived in Manchester, and to a degree it is also in evidence in Leith as well. When the first shoots of niceness start to sprout in generally tatty areas, you get the same kind of hit and miss results, but this time the impression they give is rather different.
I walk past these optimistic little cafes and shops, and the shitty pubs which people have made a real effort to civillise, and I find myself really, really hoping they’ve judged wisely. These places flicker in and out of existence, some well though out, others ill-conceived, and I always find myself wondering about the consequences for the failures.
For people walking past it’s just another in a long line of failed small businesses, but I wonder how much people sacrificed to give it a go. Did they turn their backs on a sensible career to try this? Were they investing their own money, or someone else’s, who might be more able to afford the loss? Does the failure represent total bankruptcy? Are they and their families in real financial trouble now? Is it just someone dallying or does this have really tough consequences for someone? Especially when you consider the kind of domestic conflict which financial difficulties tend to generate, every blank, silent shop front could so easily be the only public face of all sorts of heartache going on in someone’s life.
I don’t know if that makes me more or less angry about the wealthy dilettantes we tend to see around our way – more, probably; taking the kind of risks, without consequences, which other people have to sacrifice everything for the chance to try – but I find it all sort of ghoulishly intriguing. And I can never walk past a recently boarded-up storefront without wondering.
