What do we really want in our local shops?

This afternoon I was driving back along Lower Plenty Road in heavy traffic - not moving much at all here and there. One of these spots was alongside the Lower Plenty shopping centre - well shopping strip. This is the only photo I could find of it. It's a typical little stretch of road with maybe a dozen or so shops in it. So I started vaguely looking at them and then began musing on what they all were and why this should be.

I should start by explaining that, on the whole, Lower Plenty is an expensive area, although, as always, parts of it are not so ritzy. So a typical middle-class Melbourne suburb. Glamorous the shopping strip is not, though it does have a rather striking sculpture at the end of it.

I imagine it's pretty difficult to take a decent photo - you either get the cars behind it or the shops, neither of which is very pretty. Anyway it might give you an idea. And it's beside the point really.

My point is the choice of shops in the shopping centre - which I repeat - is pretty typical. You pass them everywhere in Melbourne. I cannot remember all of the shops now, but there were two bakeries, one newspaper/sub-post office, a vet, a chemist, a greengrocer, a hairdresser, a Tatts (betting shop) and a supermarket/bottle shop. Their website says there was a florist too but I don't remember it. So everything for your everyday needs - and if you think about the choice on offer that is really a bit depressing - hairdresser, betting shop, chemist ... Up above there were a few offices for things like accountants. I don't remember seeing a bank, but there must have been an ATM somewhere you would have thought.

In terms of ready-made food though, it was distinctly less classy than you might have thought for the area. There was one lone café - otherwise the choice was pizza (2) or fish and chips, a chicken shop, and Subway. There wasn't even a Chinese or Indian restaurant. Alright - across the road there is a Thai restaurant, but it's not really a great choice and just a bit down the road is the Lower Plenty Hotel which has a bistro, but these also are not really adventurous options.

Of late I have been going on about all the trendy, expensive, healthy and buzzy food that seems to be flooding our western world - and yet here we have a shopping strip in a moderately well-off area, that still offers nothing much more than takeaway pizza, chicken and chips and fish and chips. Organic was not a word that appeared on the signs there. So is the world outside of the urban hipster centre really much more conservative and unadventurous? Or is it just Lower Plenty? Eltham, after all, has many more cafés - even a one hat restaurant, and Templestowe has heaps of eating places. I suspect that Lower Plenty is more the norm. It's all a bit depressing. Two bakers though - both making a big thing about hot bread, pies and pastries.

Nevertheless it's a bit like the world going conservative and right-wing - it's all of a piece with this totally ordinary, faintly disturbing and very limite choice of shops.