Unseen Spain: The battle facing barrio businesses
Unseen Spain: The battle facing barrio businesses
It's time to adjust the lenses through which we view small businesses.
One of the great things about cheek-by-jowl urban living is that you get to see the true character and textures of Spain.
Sometimes you see (and hear) too much.
The kitchen of my first Madrid flat looked out on the building’s interior patio, inhaling the echoes of radios, televisions, phone calls, domestic shouting matches and the subsequent peace (love) making. It also looked across at a bathroom whose owner performed his daily top-to-toe grooming routine au naturel with the window open.
The trade-offs in the barrio (neighbourhood), however, pay off.
Dense, multi-service barrios make it possible to have essential services and nice things on doorsteps. The proximity that comes with barrio living in Spain allows locals to buy fresh foods and ingredients each day. It makes it possible to pop in and out of bars and bakeries, butchers and bookshops to run errands and take care of social relationships.
“Barrio is a word beloved in Spanish for the connotations it has of friendship and connection,” said Lane Green in a recent podcast for The Economist. The daily interactions, the human contact, are a window into the human side of Spaniards. Because of that frequent contact, I’ve been able to quickly start up and scale social connections in each of the three Spanish cities I’ve called home.
Proximity removes the effort behind daily social interactions. It also makes it very difficult to ignore the people behind the beating heart of the barrio: local businesses - the people who raise and lower the shutters every day, those who maintain and decorate shop fronts and leave water bowls outside for passing pets as part of a communal effort to create interesting and inviting streets.
The barrio reveals frequent moments of reciprocal humanity and kindness, but three incidents involving local businesses here in Galicia in recent weeks have reminded me that the barrio is a stage that shows all of life - including its ugly side:
The children’s clothes store: Swarming all over a small store dedicated to sustainable children’s clothing and footwear, a large family used distraction tactics (trying on a gazillion different pairs of shoes and sizes) to create chaos and confusion, allowing one member of the gang to steal the most expensive sweater in the shop.
The toy store: After a disagreement over an expired voucher that could have been resolved amicably, a hot-headed customer threatened to “ruin the business in less than two months” with online reviews. This shop specialises in toys that assist with children’s development and, after being invited to “go back to your country,” the owner had to call the police.
The coffee shop: It was an early midweek morning and the guy who makes the best flat white in A Coruña was pissed off. Rightly so. Someone had just left a one-star review of his coffee shop because it was closed when the person visited a couple of days earlier. The reviewer didn’t know that one half of the couple who run the coffee shop was sick that day and the other had to take care of two young children. Maybe they wouldn’t have cared if they did.
These small business owners told me their stories, I believe, because of the trust that comes from almost-daily contact on our good, bad, and indifferent days. We see each other during school runs, we chat at the bar over a morning café con leche or an evening cerveza. We cross paths at the park and markets. Our children play together in the plaza.
The barrio is an offline social media, and these stories reminded me that, unlike the content pinball machine that is the online world, there are no block or mute buttons in real life.
I also reflected on the lack of compassion we show small businesses today as they strive to survive in an age of capitalism on steroids and compete against organisations with shareholders and customers who they address as “Dear (first name).”
We ignore the monstrous economies of scale that allow these mega corporations to win the race to the bottom. Too used to paying too little for stuff produced in conditions we’re happy to ignore, we complain about the price of goods produced by people who work in humane conditions for a fair wage.
If we want small businesses to survive, and I think most of us do, then it’s time we adjust the absurd lenses through which we view small businesses. We overlook the social dividends they yield, the don’t worry, pay me tomorrow trust, the colour and character they add to our streets, the local events and initiatives they support. These business owners know that, what’s good for the barrio is good for them.
It’s time we, as a society, play our part in giving them a fair shake.
The tyranny of reviews
“His tenure in the White House comes with a steady deluge of grotesque lies, conspiracism, Covid denialism, corruption, sexual assault allegations, 37,000 rounds of golf, and any number of 5am tweetstorms from his toilet. It ends with an outright assault on democracy itself that is still going.”
Marina Hyde, What Just Happened?!
If only online reviews had the same influence on the race for the White House as they do on local businesses.
There’s no doubt some negative reviews are warranted. In Spain, I have seen bad (like really bad) service in bars and restaurants - the type that even Spaniards in my company have complained about.
Nonetheless, we should ask ourselves why we put so much weight into the opinions of faceless online users when some of the most powerful people in the world are free to operate with complete impunity and zero accountability. Imagine the reaction to a local business tweeting something about immigrants in the area eating pets.
In an age where one spiteful online review has the power jeopardise a livelihood, how absurd it is that we have come to expect so little from the most powerful yet pile so much pressure on the weakest. The double standards.
A negative review of a small business permeates through to the personal project behind it. The person. The sacrifices none of us see. The personal struggles we all have. These owners have no off days, they can’t deploy call centres or chat bots to deal with angry customers. Each day in the barrio, I see business owners doing their best. But nowadays - because hyper capitalism has so radically re-programmed our expectations about everything - that doesn’t seem to be enough.
A presidential candidate can call an opponent retarded without any sort of repercussions, while a guy having to close his shop to take care of his family (losing income in the process) gets slapped with is a one-star review for his troubles.
The famous Philip Roth quote comes to mind: “It's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous.”
Use it or lose it
Parked-up Amazon delivery vans now part of the landscape of our barrios. The concept of Black Friday, meanwhile has gotten out of control - there are black days, black weeks, Summer Black Friday. Nobody in Spain has an idea about where the concept of Black Friday even comes from, but it doesn’t matter. Capitalism needs constant agitation. Money needs movement.
The number of self-employed dedicated to retail in Spain as of January 2024 was an all-time low of 476,459. Since 2019, 25 pequeños comercios, small retail businesses, have closed every day. But this isn’t all down to the onslaught of online retail: Spain makes it hard to be a small business owner.
The clothes shop owner mentioned above told me that she pays close to €400 just to be self-employed, an autónoma, every single month. If she doesn’t make a single euro in sales, the cuota still has to be paid. An Italian friend of hers who is also an autónoma continues to be baffled at a system that discourages entrepreneurship: “Can someone please tell me why I have to pay to work?”
“I’ve been autónomo for 22 years and the payments are very high and are not income or profit-related,” Londoner Alex Bunsusan told The Olive Press. “So, even if you don’t earn much, you still must pay almost €300 pcm. Plus, it means doing VAT and income tax returns every three months, which is loads of paperwork, and you can’t deduct expenses ‘receipts’ like you can in the UK – all deductibles must be proper invoices.”
Any small business owner I know here delegates all of this paperwork to a gestoría, another needless expense due to business-unfriendly, labyrinthine bureaucracy. Álex Martínez Vidal, author of the satirical book Autónomos: Guía ilustrada para ser tu propio esclavo, describes how autónomos have the freedom to be their own boss and also their own slave.
Many small business owners manage the shop, online deliveries, and social media content. Some continue working at home long after they pull the shutters down. And many have other full time jobs: being a parent, a carer, a partner. Spanish women are the most stressed in Europe. They also sleep the least.
In recent years these business owners have been trying to deal with inflation at home (electricity, groceries, rent) while also managing the increasing costs of running a business, trying not to pass price rises onto already price-sensitive customers.
In 2021, the Galicia regional government, A Xunta, launched its annual Bonos Activa Comercio campaign to promote economic activity in local businesses across the region. People simply have to register to receive a QR code that provides discounts of up to €30 - I have used the voucher each of the last three years. Since its launch, the Activa Comercio campaign has stimulated more than €77m in business for independent stores in Galicia.
Such initiatives from the public sector are important, but barrio people too have a duty to support their communities. Shopping local is an investment in the barrio - it’s use it or lose it. Word of mouth recommendations or social media posts are a great and free way to promote local businesses.
Spaniards often look for the 3Bs when shopping for something: bueno (good-quality), bonito (nice-looking), barato (cheap). If the barrio as a concept as we know it - local businesses on doorsteps - then the final B will have to go.
Hospitality businesses are replacing the quintessential random barrio enterprises like shops selling just knives - Spain has enough bars and restaurants. Variety, after all, is the spice of barrio life. I want to live in vibrant, diverse neighbourhoods that feel busy and alive, places where local businesses have names like Ferretería Sánchez and Frutería María, rather than international chains that strangle the personality out of everything they touch.
I started writing this piece disheartened about the future of Spain’s barrios but I’m finishing it on a high:
After the toy store owner told her story on Instagram, she received a flood of five-star reviews from previous customers.
The Friday after the robbery (which also made social media), the children’s clothes store owner recorded her best ever single day of sales.
It was the people rallying around the neighbourhood flag.
Now it’s time to make the barrio great again.
Unseen Spain is a new La Comunidad mini-series bringing you stories from Spain that you won’t find in any travel guide.
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