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Once Upon a Shop

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Once Upon a Shop
Once Upon a Shop Is an essay, written by the British Writer Jeanette Winterson. The essay was published in the newspaper The Observer, June 13, 2010. The essay centres around her shop, Verde, in East London. Jeannette Winterson talks about the changes in London and huge firms overtake of smaller individual shops.
Politics of the world is influenced money. Huge cooperation are the ones with the big money. The government decides through taxes who pays more, and who pays less. The government would benefit far more from huge cooperation, adding jobs and benefits the BNP positively. This makes the conditions for small businesses unsustainable. Small businesses build by passion and hard labour are insignificant for the government. Passion doesn’t provide profit. Profit which the huge companies hungers for. Huge cooperation’s competition is also too though for small private businesses. “I started the shop because I believe working from the bottom up is a good idea. Verde can’t tackle Tesco round the corner, nor can it change the fixed supply chains and discounting that make it so hard for small shops to compete with big business.”(page 10 line 249-255).
In the beginning of her essay, she talks uses an historic view to tell the story of her shop. She starts by telling that she opened her first veg shop in Spitalsfields in 1805. This is clearly not true, but she explains that it is because of her townhouse age and history. Her house was built in the 1790’s and has almost ever since been a shop. She uses the history of house as a shop to paint a picture of how the shops in the neighbourhood used to be. ‘’My shop is right opposite Spitalfields Market, now full of chic shops and funky stalls, but formally the fruit and veg market for London, just as Covent Garden was the flower market, Smithfield the meat market, and Billingsgate the fishmarket.’’(page 7 Lines 11-17). In this quote she mentions all those places which used to be assembles of a lot of private shops, which now is owned by huge cooperation’s. She criticizes these huge cooperation’s throughout the text.
She decided making her townhouse into a shop after she got an offer from a coffee-cooperation. She thought about it and the fact of coffee downstairs seemed intriguing. After looking into the cooperation, she found out the bad politics of that firm, which made her decide not to sell. Afterwards she was still fund of the thought, of getting a store back in the building. An American then offers to build a store. Shen allows him because he thinks he is hard working with a good attitude. ‘’(…)Harvey Cabaniss, a food loving New Yorker trained by Fergus, with all the can-do and brio that makes Americans so endearing.’’(138-141). She uses the history to explain why she didn’t choose a huge company. Her house has through the history been owned by small stores and she wants to keep it that way. She tries to continue the legazy. ‘’I really believe that the small decisions we take profoundly influence the bigger picture.’’ (page 8 lines 76-78). In this quote, she talks about the importants of making the right choice, and even if the choice seems small and insignificant, it might influence the bigger picture. This is what she tries to emphasize with the shop Verde.

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