We found this Letter of the Week in the XL Semanal del Periódico magazine (03-03-2019).

We would like to share this reflection of Arancha because she summarizes in a few words a dynamic that we are experiencing in our day to day in our store, a recently new and worrying phenomenon of which we are all participants. If you are also concern pass on the message please!

Our cities, our stores

Each time I walk around my home town and I see a new store being opened, I think: "How brave (or how reckless)." That's what you have to be to open a shop nowadays, given that it is much more profitable to be an investor than a shopkeeper (as well as much easier). This is a time in which we prefer to buy from home just pushing a button rather than by going to browse through shops, touching goods, opening books and spending time with shopkeepers, shop assistants and other buyers.

This is a time in which we all have the same taste and only franchise brands succeed - more and more often the online - and for which we want to pay less and less. This time and its characteristics, which we are all responsible for creating, will end up making us miss those shops and the new businesses that used to surprise us and to arouse our curiosity.

Ultimately our towns and cities will be killed off. There will be no more cinemas, bookshops or small unique shops.

Instead, all that will be left will be the empty shells of the large corporations, which will use the shop windows to display their mass produced products. Products that we will buy using a computer at home, because why would we want to bother going into that cold boring town centre?

Arancha Ruiz (Santander)

Why I have rewarded it, Because one day at worst we ended up realizing that this mattered, that it didn't matter if we let it disappear. (Lorenzo Silva)

You can find the original in the following link:

https://www.xlsemanal.com/cartas-lectores/20190305/bloc-del-cartero-autocritica.html