WHO SAT HERE?
ShopLocal.gov · Retail
Challenge
Behaviour change — Urban and suburban consumers aged 25-50, digitally fluent, convenience-oriented shoppers who default to online mega-retailers out of habit rather than ideology, and who feel a latent guilt about the disappearance of neighborhood character but haven't connected their own purchasing behaviour to it.
Insight
In communities around the world, independent shop owners traditionally kept a chair by the counter — not for themselves, but for customers to sit and talk. As e-commerce eroded foot traffic, those chairs sat empty, and with them disappeared the last informal social spaces where neighbors actually knew each other's names. People didn't mourn the loss of a shop; they mourned the loss of being recognized.
Idea
Turn the empty shopkeeper's chair into a universal symbol of vanishing community connection, and create a digital platform that lets people discover the specific independent retailers disappearing in their own postal code — making the abstract threat of local retail decline feel personal and urgent.
Execution
The campaign launched with a series of short social films shot in real independent shops across twelve countries, each featuring a shopkeeper sitting in their chair telling stories about regular customers who stopped coming. A geo-targeted microsite — powered by government small-business registry data — showed users a real-time feed of independent retailers that had closed within a two-mile radius of their location in the past year, alongside those still open. In city centers, empty wooden chairs were installed outside recently shuttered storefronts with QR codes linking to the nearest surviving independent shop. The hashtag #WhoSatHere invited people to share memories of their own local shopkeepers, generating an organic archive of community retail stories.