Have you gone back to your pre-Covid shopping patterns?

This time last year many of us had no choice but to turn to locally-based businesses when supermarkets were short on the bare essentials.

Late March 2020, as the country entered its first lockdown due to the Covid 19 pandemic, supermarkets and other large retailers had empty shelves.

Locally based producers and companies rallied, rejigged their business models and almost overnight managed to provide essential goods, and those little luxuries that meant everything, to those of us stuck at home.

With the inventive and flexible approach of these small businesses came an appreciation for sustainable and locally based companies that we may not have had before. Many more of us began to appreciate the sheer range of services and products on offer in our communities and the quality of produce on offer.

Now that life is slowly returning to normal have we begun to abandon these local businesses for the larger retailers or are we still prioritising local, more sustainable producers with arguably a smaller environmental impact too?

A year on, have we gone back to our old pre-Covid shopping patterns or are we still supporting those small businesses who pulled out all the stops to help when the country was in crisis?