The Movement
Britain loses around thirty seven shops a day. Most of them independents. They do not close with an announcement. The shutters stay down one Tuesday and the town takes a week to notice.
We decided not to accept that.
Your money is a vote, and you cast it three times a day.
A town is not its buildings. It is the people who own the doors.
Nobody is coming to save the high street. That was always going to be us.
This is not charity. The independents are not owed your money, they are competing for it, and mostly they are winning on everything except habit.
It is not about spending more. It never was. It is about where the money you already spend ends up.
Pete. Built and sold three companies, spent twenty years learning how businesses live and die, and got tired of watching the wrong ones go quietly. Every day he publishes the maths of the high street and the stories of the people holding it together. That is the work. The movement is everyone doing something with it.
Telling the story of every independent worth saving, in the owner's own words, to as many people as will listen.
Making the maths impossible to ignore. Not opinions. Numbers. What a pint costs to pour, what a shop pays before it opens the door, where your money sleeps tonight.
Moving five pounds a week. Fifty people doing that puts thirteen thousand pounds a year through a small shop's till, which is roughly the gap between carrying on and a closing down sign.
There is no membership. There is no fee. There are two things.
Tell us about a business worth keeping. Yours, or one you love. The best get told to hundreds of thousands of people, and every one goes on the record here.
Then move your fiver. Same coffee, different till. Same haircut you were getting anyway.
That is the whole movement. It works the moment you do it.
Keep them open.