Do Britons Actually Want to Shop Local? The Numbers Say Yes

We hear it all the time: shop local, support small businesses, use your high street.

It’s a nice sentiment.

But do people actually mean it?

Because there’s an obvious problem. Britain is hardly short of people saying they love independent businesses, yet we’ve spent years watching familiar shops disappear from our high streets.

So I wanted to look beyond the slogans.

Do Britons genuinely want to shop locally? What actually makes us choose an independent business? And if the appetite is there, why can running one still be such a struggle?

The latest figures give us a surprisingly clear answer.

People really do want local businesses.

The difficult bit is turning that goodwill into everyday spending.

Do people actually want to shop local?

A major 2026 study of 2,040 UK consumers produced some extraordinary numbers.

Some 96% of those surveyed said they wanted to see more independent shops on their high street.

Not 60%. Not even 80%.

96%.

And it wasn’t the only striking result.

95% said they would spend more if there were more independent options available, while 85% said they would prefer to spend with local businesses rather than corporations.

That’s quite a vote of confidence in Britain’s independents.

Separate research published by Square in 2026 points in the same direction. Its survey of 1,009 UK consumers found that 70% shop locally at least once a week.

So the idea that everybody has abandoned local businesses and retreated permanently to Amazon doesn’t really stack up.

Plenty of people are still shopping locally.

And an awful lot more say they’d like greater opportunity to do it.

Why shop local in the first place?

There are all sorts of reasons people give for supporting local businesses.

Keeping money in the local economy is one.

Helping independent businesses survive is another.

Then there are local jobs, more interesting high streets and simply having some choice beyond the same handful of enormous companies.

But I think there’s a more basic reason that sometimes gets buried underneath all the worthy stuff.

People often actually prefer the experience.

The 2026 Voices of Retail research found that 82% of consumers surveyed believed independents provide a better experience than chains.

Some 61% said they choose independent businesses because of their personality.

That matters.

A good independent isn’t just a smaller version of a giant retailer.

It can offer something fundamentally different.

The owner might actually be standing behind the counter. The person advising you may have spent twenty years working with what they’re selling. They might remember your name, know what you bought last time or tell you honestly that the cheaper option is perfectly good enough.

You don’t get much of that from a self-checkout.

So why are independent businesses still struggling?

This is where things become more complicated.

If almost everybody says they wants more independent shops, why do so many high streets have empty units?

Why have so many familiar businesses disappeared?

And why does another vape shop sometimes seem to appear approximately seven minutes after the previous shop closes?

The answer is that wanting independent businesses to exist and actually using them aren’t quite the same thing.

Most of us have probably done it.

We genuinely want the butcher down the road to survive.

Then it’s 6pm, it’s raining, we’re knackered and we’re already standing in Tesco.

So the supermarket gets the money.

That doesn’t mean people are lying when they say they want to support local businesses.

It means local businesses have to compete with price, convenience and habit every single day.

Price matters when people shop locally

There can be a slightly irritating attitude towards shopping locally that boils down to: you should pay more because it’s the right thing to do.

Real life doesn’t work like that.

People have mortgages, rent, energy bills, children to feed and a finite amount of money.

Square’s 2026 research found that quality was the most important consideration when UK consumers chose where to shop or eat, cited by 73%.

Price followed at 63%, with convenience at 57%.

Half of those surveyed said high prices could make them hesitate to try somewhere new.

That’s an important reality for anyone talking about supporting local businesses.

Someone can desperately want their local high street to thrive and still buy something elsewhere because it’s £20 cheaper.

For some households, £20 isn’t loose change.

It’s the difference between being able to afford something and not.

Convenience is a brutal competitor

Then there’s convenience.

Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted something, you generally had to go and find somewhere selling it.

Now you can be lying in bed at 11pm, tap your phone a few times and have practically anything imaginable heading towards your front door.

That’s what the local independent is competing against.

It might close before you finish work.

You might have to drive there.

You might have to pay to park.

And after all that, it might not have exactly what you wanted.

None of this is necessarily the business owner’s fault.

It’s simply difficult to compete with a retail system that has spent billions making it almost ridiculously easy for us to spend money without leaving the sofa.

The Voices of Retail research found that 63% of consumers said free parking and more independent shops would encourage them to visit the high street more often.

That second part is particularly interesting.

People aren’t merely saying they want the remaining independent shops to survive.

They’re saying more independent businesses would make the high street itself more attractive.

The British high street has a chicken-and-egg problem

Imagine a town centre with a good butcher, bakery, greengrocer, café, bookshop, clothes shop and a few interesting independents.

You can make a morning of it.

Now remove the butcher.

Then the bookshop.

Then the clothes shop.

Suddenly there’s less reason to go into town at all.

Footfall drops. The remaining shops lose passing customers. Another business closes.

And now there’s even less reason to visit.

Official figures show just how much the British high street has changed.

Office for National Statistics data published in 2026 found that retail employment on central high streets in Great Britain fell by 19% between 2015 and 2024.

But that doesn’t mean town centres simply emptied.

Over the same period, employment in accommodation and food services on central high streets increased by 18%.

In other words, the high street is changing.

In many places, traditional retail has increasingly given way to cafés, restaurants and services.

Whether that’s good or bad probably depends on what you want from your town centre.

But it certainly isn’t the high street many of us grew up with.

Independent shops have something chains struggle to copy

A small retailer is unlikely to beat a multinational purely on price.

Fortunately, it doesn’t necessarily have to.

One of the strongest findings in the 2026 research was the importance shoppers placed on personality, service and expertise.

And this is where independents can have a genuine advantage.

A giant company can copy a product.

It can undercut the price.

It can spend millions getting itself to the top of Google.

What it struggles to reproduce is the bloke behind the counter who has been doing the job for thirty years and knows exactly what he’s talking about.

Or the woman who owns the shop and remembers what you bought your mum for her birthday last year.

Or the tradesman whose reputation depends on bumping into his customers in the same town for the next twenty years.

That’s not some misty-eyed argument for going back to 1957.

It’s something people still value.

Has AI made human service more valuable?

One finding genuinely surprised me.

Nine out of ten consumers surveyed for Voices of Retail said AI had made them more eager to see products in person and speak to a real expert.

When asked whose recommendation they trusted, 81% chose a local retailer.

Only 8% chose an AI assistant.

There’s something rather funny about that.

For years we’ve been told technology would make physical shops and face-to-face expertise increasingly irrelevant.

Instead, the more automated everything becomes, the more valuable dealing with an actual person might start to feel.

An algorithm can give you 500 choices.

Someone who knows their trade can tell you which one you actually need.

You can’t support a local business you can’t find

There’s another problem that doesn’t get talked about enough.

Visibility.

I’ve encountered this constantly while building FindABrit.

There are excellent independent businesses all over Britain that are incredibly difficult to find online.

Some have ancient websites.

Some barely use social media.

Some are brilliant at what they actually do and absolutely hopeless at telling anybody about it.

Meanwhile, enormous companies have SEO teams, advertising departments and marketing budgets specifically designed to make sure they’re the first thing you see.

Search for something online and the best business isn’t necessarily at the top.

Often, it’s simply the business that’s best at being found.

That’s quite a disadvantage when you’re a bloke who spends his day fitting kitchens rather than studying Google algorithms.

Supporting local businesses doesn’t have to be all or nothing

I think this is where some shop-local campaigns get it wrong.

They can make supporting independent businesses sound like a moral obligation.

Buy local. Always.

Avoid the big companies.

Spend more if necessary.

Most people aren’t going to live like that.

I’m certainly not going to pretend they will.

Sometimes Amazon has exactly what you need.

Sometimes the supermarket is considerably cheaper.

Sometimes there isn’t a suitable independent alternative anywhere nearby.

Supporting local businesses doesn’t require you to swear an oath never to enter Tesco again.

It can be much simpler than that.

Buy the birthday present from the independent shop instead of automatically ordering it online.

Have breakfast at the family-run café.

Try the local tradesman before ringing the national company.

Use the butcher occasionally rather than never.

Buy from the small British website when the price and product make sense.

No single purchase is going to rescue the British high street.

But thousands of ordinary purchasing decisions are ultimately what determine which businesses are still there next year.

Why shopping local still matters

The most interesting thing about the latest research isn’t that Britain has suddenly fallen back in love with independent businesses.

I don’t think we ever really stopped.

The demand appears to be there.

96% of consumers in one major survey said they wanted more independents on their high street. Separate research found seven in ten UK consumers already shop locally at least weekly.

The challenge is closing the gap between wanting local businesses and actually choosing them.

Price matters.

Convenience matters.

Parking matters.

Opening hours matter.

And being able to find the business in the first place matters.

That last one is something we can actually do something about.

It’s a big part of why I built FindABrit: to make good British businesses easier to discover and give people somewhere else to look before automatically defaulting to the biggest name.

If you’d like to support more independent businesses, you can find British businesses on FindABrit from across the country.

You don’t need to completely change the way you shop.

Just look local, independent or British first when it makes sense.

Because if we want good independent businesses to be there when we need them, every so often we actually have to use them.