Why we lost our local bakeries

The received wisdom, or what everyone knows, is that small, local bakeries all closed down because giant evil corporate supermarket chains opened up branches in small towns and out-priced the small, family-owned local bakers which, as a result, had to close down. victims of corporate greed.

Whilst this might have happened in some cases, the story I can relate, based on my own local experience does not bear this out.

I am thinking of a moderately sized market town. It had three traditional family owned bakers who all did a very good business supplying fresh bread to the people of the town.

However, the young generations of the family bakers did not want to follow on in the footsteps of their parents. 

Their parents had to get up at three o'clock in the morning to mix the dough and to fire up the ovens to bake the bread. 

Their children did not want to get up in the middle of the night to bake bread so they decided to go off to do other things and follow other career paths. One went to work for the Inland Revenue, some joined the armed forces and so on. 

Eventually when the older generations of bakers came to retirement age they had nobody to pass their businesses on to and one-by-one, they closed down.

Eventually the Morrison's supermarket chain came to town and opened up a bakery department which made fresh bread and fresh cakes. Items we hadn't seen in town for several years.

When someone was chuntering on about how the supermarkets had killed off small, family bakers I pointed out that all of the family bakers in town had closed before Morrison's came to town. He said: "Oh! That's right, isn't it? I hadn't realised that!"

(Image curtesy summa/Pixabay.)