Saturday, December 15

Costa Waterlooville invasion

Whilst doing my regular shopping trip in Waterlooville, i couldn't help notice that the Costa coffee shop chain has taken over the old Woolwich Bank site.

I am worried for the existing cafe's and coffee shops in Waterlooville. In particular Cafe Moka which has been built up by some local girls and does a roaring trade. They also have a cafe in Emsworth. I just hope they survive in face of the possibly aggressive competition from Costa.

I wish local government were more supportive of local businesses. Considering the Waterlooville area is primarily Tory ground, one would think they would be.

Good and bad Waterlooville shopping news

The last few weeks and months have seen some changes to the mixture of shops in Waterlooville. Last Saturday a new shop called Planet Trash opened up selling products made from recycled materials. The products include, Christmas decorations made from CDs, mouse mats made from recycle rubber, toothbrushes made from recycled plastic and bags made from various recycled materials.

That is just a small selection of what they sell. They also have a web site called Planet trash.

That is some good news. The bad news is that they replace a local small sports shop that occupied the premises for decades, but it looks like the sports shop were forced out of business after years trying to compete with the big corporate sports chain that opened in the planet damaging Hambledon Road Retail Park.

Thats not the only bad news, because the local small cycle shop also closed having lost the battle locally trying to compete with the large Halfords store, also located at the Hambledon Road Retail Park.

The Parks retail stores have successfully wiped out the towns shoe shops, sports shop, cycle shop and many other shops. At the same time the Retail Parks car park is a menace to pedestrians trying to get into Waterlooville.

Saturday, December 1

Havant Tesco battle not over yet

It seems that despite our councillors voting to allow Tesco to redevelop the Havant store into a larger 'Extra' store, Friends of the Earth believe there is still a chance that the Tesco can be stopped via the Government Office for the South East.

Lets hope they succeed because unless these large scale developments are halted we will end up with commercial uncompetitive monopolies dominating our towns and encouraging people to travel long distances by car to get to them, killing off sustainable local developments.