Yes, Chains Pay People. Here Is Where the Money Stops.

Someone in my comments said chains pay people too. They do. That is not the argument.

The argument is what happens to the money after the wage is paid. A chain employs someone who lives in your city, fine. But the profit generated by that employee does not stay in your city. It goes to head office. Head office is probably not in your city. From there it goes to a warehouse that is not in your country, a legal team that is not in your country, and dividend holders who are not in your country. The wage stays local. Everything else leaves the same day.

That is the mechanic. Nobody is a villain in it. It is just how a centralised business is built to work.

Now compare that to your local independent. You spend a pound in the corner shop. The shopkeeper uses that pound to buy stock from a local supplier, pay a local accountant, get a round in at the local pub. That pub landlord pays a local cleaner. The cleaner spends it at the market on a Saturday. The economic multiplier effect on a locally spent pound runs at around seven. The same pound does seven times the work before it eventually leaks out of the local economy.

When you spend that pound in a chain, the multiplier collapses almost immediately. The wage is local. The rest is gone.

So the comment is half right. Chains do pay people. But paying one person in a city while extracting the broader profit is not the same as keeping money circulating in that city. The 95 per cent version of this holds: almost every time you shop independent over a chain, more of your money stays in the place you actually live.

That is not sentiment. That is the mechanics of where money goes after it leaves your hand.

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