Madam, – Can somebody please clarify how a Tesco store opening can be viewed as today’s “good news” story?
We are expertly advised that retail sales are in decline, a downward arc that has continued for a couple of years. So a UK-owned retailer, the biggest, opens a store in Naas, and our political leader has time to celebrate these 260 “new” jobs, and lend the retailer a useful prime-time minute of positive PR on RTÉ News. If my memory of the most basic economics is correct, the opening of this massive store, in a contracting market, leads to sales in smaller, disparate, often independently-owned stores, from shoes, to grocery to hardware and electrics, being soaked up.
The outlook is bleak and short term for these stores, many of which would be owned by people local to Naas, and likely collectively employ more than the 260 people required in an efficient global retailing machine.
So another dead town centre, and the loss of local businesses and the associated community beckons.
Can the media please stop dressing up these situations, which are at best job swaps, and more likely net job losses? More honestly, they represent the death- knell of local businesses and natively-earned profits, as self-employed business people become multinational employees.
This “good news” has many negative impacts, only one of which is that it will lengthen, not shorten, the dole queue in Naas. – Yours, etc,