Here’s what came to mind while watching a Canada Post van trundle down a residential street in Victoria on Sunday: Jeff Bezos’s fortune has grown by $35 billion US during the pandemic.
The two are connected. Amazon founder Bezos, the world’s richest man, is getting even richer as hunkered-down consumers turn to online shopping. Canada Post is just getting overwhelmed. Meanwhile, local retailers, the ones we claim to love because We’re All In This Together, are buckling at the knees.
A quick qualification: It’s not just the shift to shopping at the online giants that inspired Canada Post to begin Sunday home delivery of parcels in Greater Victoria in mid-March. The cumbersome process of sorting mail in plants that weren’t designed for physical- distancing has also clogged the system.
But yes, it’s mostly the sheer number of parcels — three times the norm for this time of year — that led the post office to begin offering voluntary weekend overtime to handle the avalanche.
“With parcel deliveries growing at a record pace from April to May, Canada Post hit an all-time, one-day record on Tuesday, May 19 with 2.1 million parcels delivered to Canadians,” the corporation says.
“It’s not just the volumes that are causing challenges. The number of larger household items, like mini-fridges, patio furniture and barbecues coming through our network have also increased. These bulky items often require a two-person lift which creates additional safety challenges and delays.”
What the corporation doesn’t say is this shift is killing local retailers.
OK, there’s no putting this toothpaste back in the tube. Online shopping is here. And it’s not axiomatic that every online transaction equals another bullet in Victoria’s already-wounded small businesses; most of them have a digital presence, too.
But when we do choose to stuff money into the pockets of the Bezoses of the world, we’re effectively taking it out of the pockets of our friends and neighbours and pushing them closer to the brink.
“What we’re actually talking about now is survival,” says Catherine Holt, the CEO of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce. We’re way past support-your-local-retailer boosterism. It’s desperation time.
Have you been downtown lately?
At 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, I spotted two young guys standing in the middle of Broad Street between Fort and Broughton, tossing a football back and forth. This wasn’t the latest let’s-close-the-roads hobby horse ridden out of City Hall. It was a scene from Zombieland, no other sign of life in sight.
“That’s symbolic of how few people are coming downtown,” Holt says. Businesses in the city core have taken a double-whammy, losing not only the usual flood of tourists but the thousands of office workers — including those who toil for government — who they had hoped would return as COVID restrictions eased, but who continue to work from home.
“Those businesses have to get some revenue to survive.”
That includes digital revenue. “You can buy online, but make sure you’re buying from a local business,” Holt says.
“If you’re going to buy a book, buy it from a local bookstore that will deliver it to your door.” (And that bookstore will likely use a local firm to do the delivery, she adds.)
It’s pretty simple. The economy can’t teeter along propped up by CERB payments, rent relief and wage subsidies forever. When we shop locally, the money stays in town and the lifeblood keeps pumping. The bricks-and-mortar businesses that create jobs and generate property taxes keep doing so, paying for the parks, pools, policing, hospitals, fire protection, education and other services that make for a functional community.
But no, no, that coffeemaker is $12 cheaper on the big box online site, so we’ll spend our money there because those 12 bucks feel more real than any indirect consequences on some local store. Many of us need to squeeze every last dollar out of our paycheques these days, even if that means funnelling our money to Jeff Bezos instead of Ned Flanders next door.
Fair enough. Just don’t bother mailing a sympathy card when Ned loses his job. The post office has a backlog.
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