About At Market
Local is best
If you’re like us, you’ve struggled to find somewhere that makes it easy to order local, seasonal food and other locally made things without being told you will need to pay a higher price. You want to buy local because you know the food hasn’t spent days in transit and you want to support the local economy while helping to reduce your carbon footprint. However, you’re not sure why you have to keep paying more.
At Market is creating a platform for “Local sustainable trading using minimum energy costs and real prices”.
What this means is that At Market is dedicated to ensuring Producers receive a fair price for what they work hard to produce. But with no modern shareholders to satisfy and no excessive profit margins to protect, a fair price for the Producer also becomes a fair price for the equally hard working Customer.
We believe “local is best” and that stimulating a more local economy not only reduces our dependency on oil, but also enhances the quality of the food we eat. It will also provide local artists, producers, craftsmen and craftswomen with an always open and easy to access place to meet customers.
Being part of the local community means we can ask for local products to be made or grown on behalf of customers. This restores that forgotten but valuable link between the customer and the producer. Better still, it means that, when the oil runs out, we have a sustainable local economy to help provide for our community too!
Tolling
At Market uses the traditional market philosophy of tolling. Toll markets used to be the standard method of bringing locally produced goods to market. It meant that Producers had a cost effective route to retail and Customers were not paying for the more costly overheads that are typical of recent trends in retail.
In other words, Tolling means that the greater proportion of the sales price is retained by the Producer. This is in contrast to the current retail model, where prices are set in advance and the inevitable profit created by controlling supply and demand remains with the shareholders. As a result, Producers are often left with barely enough to cover production costs. Worse still, the provenance and quality of products is stretched for shareholder benefit to the detriment of the customer.
We like to think that At Market is building a futuristic exchange for all goods by combining the very latest technologies with older proven practices to restore traditional and more respectful values to the benefit of both producers and consumers. Recognising that previous generations used leading edge technology to match quality, demand, and value, we hope to use At Market to help future generations to play their part in restoring a more responsible approach to production and consumption.
You benefit
The bottom line is At Market will be able to offer you “Life’s Essentials” at supermarket prices.
By matching local supply and demand, our prices are set naturally so that we can all afford to buy and sell local products.
A Bit of background
The idea for At Market was born out of disappointment.
Stephen Baker and Derek Bond are the driving force behind At Market. As passionate believers in both the toll market philosophy and the need for a place for local producers and consumers to discover each other, they put in a bid to renovate the Chichester Butter Market and reopen it as a traditional toll market
When their bid was rejected by the city council, Stephen and Derek decided to take their vision on-line. At Market is the result.
All of us in the At Market team hope you like what you see and, if you do not find what you need, let us know!
We believe that there are very few things that cannot be made or grown locally on behalf of local customers and then traded at affordable market prices.
High margins and high overheads drive inflation. Natural demand does, too, of course. Stephen and Derek simply hope that others will recognise which pieces of the inflation jigsaw we can all live without.