07/04/2025
Some hard truths about the roadworks…
This is a photograph of me last year… business was good and we were constantly trying to improve the building (it’s old so needs constant attention) so our customers had a good experience when visiting us ☺️
There are now 47 local people employed at the Bookstore because business has been booming…going from strength to strength over the last few years, thanks to all you wonderful people visiting and supporting us.
That is, until the roadworks started…
When they first began, for a week or two, they only had a small impact on business and I, perhaps foolishly, believed that we would be ok for the duration of the work (12 weeks!) and that, of course, it is essential work to hopefully save lives on the bad junction, so we would just have to weather any small financial loss (I made sure we had an overdraft in place just in case).
Unfortunately, after the first week or so, I started to notice a definite decline in takings, I assumed as local people started to avoid the area because of the traffic lights, which is understandable.
However, the real problem started, as many of you will have seen from my previous posts, when the local council decided to put their notice in the papers and on their site (which was then shared far and wide by social media) that proclaimed ‘Brierlow Bar Junction will be completely closed for four full weekends’! They might as well have said ‘if you were thinking of visiting the Bookstore at Brierlow Bar anytime over this period, don’t bother’. The thing is, it’s only two weekends and there’s access to us from both directions 🤷♀️
The worst part is….they didn’t even tell me they had put the notice out…nobody informed me of anything to do with any closures. I found out completely by accident about a week and a half before they were due to close the junction for the first time and by then the damage had been done.
Since then, I have been trying to mitigate this misleading information put out by the council…but it doesn’t seem to be working…our takings have now dropped so significantly that I’m constantly worried about how we’ll get through the next month (the roadworks are due to finish on May 2nd 🙌).
I just want to clarify that I am not worried about myself…I am worried about the 47 people who work hard to make the Bookstore such a wonderful place and all our lovely suppliers who all need to be paid at the end of each month.
When the local council speak to me they don’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation…they say that they’ll learn from their mistake (of not informing me so I could have paid to have an advert below their notice in the paper saying that we are open throughout the road closures) and this won’t happen again to other small businesses in future, which is obviously a good thing, however, it really doesn’t help us right now!
One person even said to me ‘we (the council) have to spend over a thousand pounds on the advert in the paper as it has to run for 12 weeks’ … I suggested that if they had told me about the ad then I could have had one beneath it to say we would be open. His response was ‘we couldn’t afford to put an advert in for you too’! I explained that I was saying that I would have happily paid for that…as paying just over one thousand pounds would have been a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of money we have now lost!
I had the above conversation with the council on April 2nd … we have since lost in takings (compared to last year) £10,000…in the five days since our phone call!
Since the start of the roadworks we have lost significantly more than that…
This month our NI contribution goes up and wages have also risen significantly. I had forecast that we would be ok with the rise in both, as long as we continued to do well and I tightened the purse strings here and there…doing less ‘improvement’ work or just leaving a little longer between projects.
Now, because of the lack of communication from the council and the contractor (until the last few weeks when I posted on here about their lack of duty of care…now they are keeping me informed…too little too late unfortunately) we are really struggling financially. This is obviously not anyone’s fault other than the previously mentioned bodies, but when I check to see if we can claim any compensation from the council or through our insurance, I can’t. Even though we are the only business affected and even though we have suffered massive losses, we can’t get any help at all! If it had been a utility company we could have made a claim for lost earnings…but not when it’s the council that’s responsible for not informing us about the planned closures.
The point of this rant…sorry, it’s been a long one!…does anyone out there in Facebook land know anything we can do to fight this? Any way we can claim at least a small percentage of what we have lost?
Alternatively, do you know any billionaires who might lend us £30,000? 🤣
Thank you so much to those of you who have kept battling through the roadworks to visit us….you’re all amazing ❤️
Ps the last junction closure is this weekend 12th and 13th April (bang in the middle of the Easter holidays and usually one of our busiest times of the year) and we are OPEN throughout and would love to see you 🥰 We will be losing all our passing holiday trade, but we look forward to seeing you all if you can make it. If you’ve read this far …you’re amazing, but you knew that already 😘 ###
