I OFTEN find myself in conversation with people about the shopping experience within our towns.

Gourock, and especially Kempock Street, has in recent years re-invented itself as an almost arty wee town with its galleries and its café culture.

It’s with Greenock and Port Glasgow where the problems lie.

Greenock has the issue of too much space and not enough shops. This is being addressed through the demolition of a sizeable part of the Oak Mall and the revamping of West Blackhall Street, which should condense the retail offering into much more focussed areas.

Port Glasgow’s traditional town centre would love to draw a bit of trade from the highly successful Gallagher Retail Park a few hundred yards away but has never really managed to say that it does.

The advantage that Port Glasgow has is that it has managed to remain something of a community hub.

It still has a bank and a post office, a council office, a health centre, dentists, lawyers, churches and a library, so at times it can still have a bit of a buzz.

The new term for this is the Twenty-Minute Neighbourhood seemingly.

Where the Port falls down is the proliferation of fast-food takeaways. Fifteen within a five-minute walk of the town hall. Don’t ask me how they all survive but they do. Aye, in these dark days of the credit crunch there are still plenty of folk paying for someone else to cook their dinner and deliver it to their door. Don’t start me! Where was I?

It's certainly not the council’s job to provide or open retail shops as many people seem to think.

Yes, they should do their best to provide an environment where shops can flourish, and businesses can feed off each other. Incorporate green spaces. Make it a pleasant place to be. Safe and enjoyable.

But who wants to open a shop? That’s the major issue that every High Street is facing.

Here’s a shop for you, what are you going to sell?

What can you sell that you can’t get in the big supermarkets? What can you sell that you couldn’t with two clicks of an online button have delivered to your house the next day?

Just think of those names that have disappeared from our shopping streets. Casualties of war.

Even food shopping. Take Inverclyde. Fishmongers all but gone. Fruit and veg? There is but one left and if it wasn’t for the funeral flowers he’d be gone as well. Butchers? They’ve held out to a degree. A different quality than the supermarkets. With their individual recipes for good sausages and pies they have kept their heads above the water but in the last forty years, since 1983, their numbers in Inverclyde have fallen from forty-four to seven!

To open a shop now it has to be niche. Selling something that is not easy to find elsewhere. Artisan almost. Then you have a chance.

So, what can the council do to help? There is free business advice for a start, finance and business plans and all that kind of stuff. They can help with the cost of new shopfronts.

They can issue grants for marketing and other stuff as well. They can point you in the right direction. There might be a few hoops to jump through and they’ll no’ want to make it too easy for you but it will be worth the perseverance.

And at the end of it all you get to become your own boss and you get to work loads and loads of hours for hardly any pay.

And that my friends is the joy of it!

PS Buy local where you can!