One place where the arguments get made in full, with the workings. Every piece starts life as a video and stands here in writing, dated and searchable.
A chain menu was locked in months ago, maybe longer. Someone in a head office, somewhere, signed it off for the season and moved on. The chalkboard menu on the wall of your local…
Your landlord has a second job now. Not because they want one. Because it is the only way to keep the lights on and the taps running when you walk in on a Saturday.
Everyone assumes the market is a treat. A nice-to-have. Something you do when you want to feel virtuous, not when you want to save money. That assumption is wrong.
More than 1,000 chemist shops have closed in the last ten years. That number should bother you, and not just because you liked the one on your corner.
Four words tell me more than four pages of corporate history. Worked at a small business. That is the line I look for, and most recruiters scroll straight past it.
Every town has one. You walk past and it is always dead. No queue, no passing trade, no Instagram presence. And yet, somehow, the owner is still there. Still at the bench. Still…
Someone in my comments said they tried to support the high street but the tradesperson was booked out for six weeks. They meant it as a frustration. I want to flip that completely.
In a lot of Britain the high street is not a street at all. It is a van that turns up.
That £5 donut is not greed. It is a business doing twelve months of arithmetic in three.
I tried to retire. Properly tried. Different countries, different cities, the full tour. And what I kept finding, wherever I went, was that the thing I missed most was British…
Ninety-five bank branches are closing in the UK between now and spring. That is not a rumour. That is the report.
The charity shops are leaving. That is the sentence I did not expect to be writing, but here we are.
Someone in my comments said chains pay people too. They do. That is not the argument.
The sign says one thing. The ownership structure says another.
I sold three companies and did nothing for two years.
The average business rate was £3,500. It is now £8,500. In one year.
Someone in my comments told me they love the idea of supporting the high street, but they simply cannot afford it. I want to be very clear about where I stand, because this one…
A hundred thousand people watched my barbershop video in a single day. I have been doing this long enough to know what the comments will look like before I read them. But this…
Someone wrote to keepthemopen.com recently and I have not been able to stop thinking about it. The message was simple: go back twenty years, and every time you arrived in a new…
A barber shop to men is more than just a haircut. That is not my line. That is what the barbers themselves said after a video I made about independent barbershops hit a hundred…
Someone left a comment on one of my videos, pulled from a submission on keepthemopen.com, and it said: it's easy for you to say, you've got money to throw at the butcher and the…
Someone sent this to me on keepthemopen.com and I have not stopped thinking about it since.
Three stops on the high street costs you £12 before you've touched a door handle. That is the maths councils have built, apparently without noticing.
There is a version of this problem nobody talks about, and a story sent into keepthemopen.com put it plainly enough that I had to stop and write it up.
Nobody who books a holiday expecting to discover a city actually wants to check into the same lobby they could find in any airport on earth. They want someone who has been…
The person behind the counter at your local does not know if they are going to make it this month.
Nothing is ever free. That is the whole argument, and if you take one thing from this, take that.
Nobody wants a chain hotel. They think they do, because the booking is easy and the loyalty points feel like something, but what they actually want is a place with a person in it.
The market is the cheapest place to buy your groceries in the UK. Most people under forty have never even been to one, and that is not an accident.
Walk out of a London terminus and your phone already knows what you want. An app, a pin, a car in four minutes. I don't want it.
A British teenager got a million followers in three days. That is the starting point, and it matters more than it sounds.