City-centre trade: who pays when the street stops?

According to franceinfo, Gérald Barbier, president of the Chambre de commerce et d'industrie de Paris (the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry), has raised the alarm ahead of further protests planned for Saturday: "traditional retail is in danger." Certain sectors, he recalls, make "40% of their turnover in the last two months of the year." He fears that shops "may not recover" if new incidents occur. The franceinfo summary specifies neither the nature of the incidents, nor the sectors concerned, nor any estimate of losses. We therefore do not know, at this stage, how many shops are really under threat.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First remark: the phrase "commerce is in danger" is very convenient. It lumps the neighbourhood baker, the franchisee and the big chain together under a single word, as if they shared the same fate. Yet fragility is not evenly distributed. A business that concentrates 40% of its sales into eight weeks has no cushion: one closed street, a few lost Saturdays, and the cash drains away. The large chains, by contrast, spread the risk across hundreds of outlets and negotiate with their landlords and banks. The shock is the same; the shock absorber is not.

Second remark: the question "who pays?" has a three-tier answer. First, the small owner, who sees unsold stock and rent falling due all the same. Next, his employees, first in line when the sails must be trimmed: fewer hours, short contracts not renewed, seasonal staff not hired. Finally, the owner of the premises and the creditor, who, for their part, collect. The conceptual notes of the Gazette remind us that crises are usually resolved by pushing costs downward; a bad year-end, on a small scale, follows the same slope.

Third remark, more insidious: the vocabulary. We speak of shops that "do not recover" as if of a accident of terrain, and of protests as if they were bad weather. The economy appears as the victim, with no actors. This is what we call the fetishism of the commodity: relations between people (those who protest, those who sell, those who rent, those who decide the policies that provoke the anger) become relations between things, "turnover" set against "the street". What remains to be known is what the protesters are demanding, and on this the text says nothing. It is hard to establish responsibility without that.

It should be noted, finally, that dependence on the last quarter is itself a symptom: a shop that survives only on the Christmas rush is one whose margins, faced with rents, platforms and the supermarket giants, are thin all year round. The CCI is right to sound the alarm; it would be wrong to let it be believed that the street is the only threat.

Question for Saturday: if aid is released, will it go to the cash flow of small shops, or to the landlords and banks waiting for it at the turn of the road?