In light of the fast-approaching Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas Day, Love Wimbledon is urging businesses to encourage their employees to shop local this festive season and help to support small local independent businesses, charity shops and markets in Wimbledon Town Centre.

It is evident that online shopping has become increasingly popular in recent years, with buying behaviour changing rapidly too. Now more than ever, consumers are buying and returning more items online, with next-day delivery and free returns becoming the new standard. Often shoppers buy clothes online with the expectation of returning them, with recent figures suggesting that almost half of what consumers spend online, is returned.

What is often forgotten is the environmental impact of these few mouse clicks, which is becoming increasingly relevant given the current state of climate change. Despite its advantages, shopping online has a large impact on the environment. Shopping online often means receiving more packages within multiple deliveries, typically from delivery trucks or vans, with excess packaging used, including single-use plastic. Compare this to shopping locally, where consumers tend to use their one trip to their local town centre to combine tasks, e.g. purchase Christmas presents, grab some groceries and browse through a bookstore.

Photo Credits: First Mile

Shopping local, also means that the money spent stays local. In other words, rather than adding to the profits of multi-national chains, this money goes into the pockets of your neighbours in the community. By choosing to shop local, this money could be helping a family-run independent business, who’s owners are trying to fund a new bike for their child. Local businesses tend to be smaller, produce less waste than their enormous counterparts, and usually buy locally, live locally, and therefore create less air pollution and traffic.

Love Wimbledon is passionate about sustainability and as a business, we look wherever possible to reduce our environmental impact. Whether this is through managing a single-use plastic free market or using local businesses as suppliers, we ensure we have sustainability on our agenda within all our planning.

“By shopping locally at our independent businesses, charity shops and our market stalls, you are helping to keep the character and diversity of our town centre alive. Shopping online also means losing out on receiving great customer service and often, local businesses offer good value and outstanding, personal service all year round, bringing a warm, welcoming personality to a town centre whilst building that all-important sense of community and belonging”

– Helen Clark Bell, CEO of Love Wimbledon.

Go one step further this Black Friday and Cyber Monday, by resisting the urge to sell more and instead opting for recycling or reusing initiatives instead, which help reduce the demand for new products and their associated carbon footprint. Your business can be more efficient by considering sustainability issues. These can include your supply chain, reducing your overhead costs, interrogating your waste streams to improve your recycling rate and generally support the business community in the Wimbledon Town Centre.

Love Wimbledon has teamed up with award-winning, zero to landfill, recycling and waste company First Mile, to help businesses make terrific savings through waste collections and recycling. To find out more information on sustainable cost-saving schemes offered by Love Wimbledon, visit our website.

Photo Credits: First Mile

Shop smart and shop local this season, and urge others to do the same. Wimbledon is full of great independent stores including Fayre & Square, Fielders, Aubergine Art Gallery, Health Zone and Phokas Barbers, as well as charity stops, including the National Institute for African Studies charity shop,  Cancer Research and Oxfam, and is home to our highly successful Christmas Markets. Opt against contributing to overproduction and the environmental impact of this, by going green this Black Friday and supporting our independent businesses on Small Business Saturday, Saturday 7th December.

Join our vision to ensure a brighter future for Wimbledon and help to strengthen our town centre businesses.