Reading over the article, you can’t help feel that the countless lamenting by local businesses complaining that locals do not support and spend money at their businesses, that they are not helping themselves either. If Mold businesses and Llangollen businesses were intelligent enough to get their act together and secure funding to help improve things then what does that say about Wrexham’s lacklustre to non-existent attempts to secure ‘free WAG cash on the table’.
The fact that the council got involved with – “several hundred letters’ were written to local businesses to gauge the appetite for a Wrexham BID however ‘nearly no responses’ were received” is embarrassing. For once blame is not laid at the council’s door and neither can the “use it or lose it” excuse be deployed. Now I know this won’t be applicable to some micro-businesses who perhaps wouldn’t have time to get involved in any BID funding activity or have the resources to deal with it. But these smallest traders too should be disappointed that there are so many – so-called local champions of business who give it the “Big I Am” on certain social media sites and at all of the press events on how successful at business they are. Yet none of these are able to cobble together a collective of entrepreneurial minds to secure some much needed cash to support Wrexham’s businesses.
I’m sure someone will come up with some kind of excuse but the constant theme from us shoppers is that we want local businesses, we want to support them, we want to spend cash in town. That’s an untapped market of people – not everyone has written Wrexham off.