In recent years many small local shops have closed because customers travel to large shopping centers or malls to do their shopping. Is this a positive or negative development?

It is argued by many that the closing of small local business will cause the demise of the communities because of the rapid growth of the malls and the inability of the small businesses to compete. I personally believe that, it is a negative development because termination of local shops will bring about an end of the local communities, and I am going to explain it in the upcoming paragraphs.

To begin

with, a good reason why it is a pessimistic growth, because there are many people who are not able to afford the prices offered by the super-centres and the mall, so they prefer to buy their stuff from the regional shops.

For instance

, half of the big stores in Lagos state selling the items are a bit more expensive than regular prices, because they want to get back the money to pay the rents.

Thus

, some locals are not able to buy these goods because of the high prices. Another point to consider is that, most of the shopping centres are situated away from the rural areas, and not all the residents have their own vehicles to go to the big plazas.

This

means the population residing in the small towns cannot travel long distance just for small quantity shopping. To exemplify

this

, more than half of the people live in the rural areas of Ghana prefer to buy all the necessary stuff from the local markets

instead

of travelling to the big shopping complexes in the city.

As a result

, people believe that small markets are enough to meet their needs, so they have decided to shop from the local shops,

instead

of going to the malls. To sum up, the closure of small business will signal the end of the local communities because of the high cost of

such

items from the

such

plazas and the far distances created by the building of

such

large shopping centres.