All retailers would like to think that they work at a micro and macro level, but is it really possible for a chain to create a relevant local offer?

Oscar Farinetti, founder of Eataly, the “slow food” emporium in Turin, made a good point at last week’s World Retail Congress in Berlin. Speaking of rolling out a retail concept, which to an extent he has begun to do, he pointed out that “replicating the atmosphere” was rather more what it should be about than slavishly trying to do the same thing over and over again.

Farinetti has in fact taken the ethos that underpins Eataly and teamed it up with a bookshop format in Bologna. At this point, there will be those who will think this is fine providing the retail proposition in question is not a nationwide chain and that if you are the latter, then this insubstantial way of doing things won’t wash. And up to a point this is correct.

But more broadly, the subtext to what Farinetti is saying is that retailers need to be responsive to their locality and that replicating an atmosphere should involve understanding the defining characteristics of a specific town or area and using that as the starting point. Budgens has tried to do this in Hampstead with a logo over the door informing shoppers that this is “Thornton’s Budgens” - a reference, presumably to its ownership by a Mr Thornton. There’s even a picture of a middle-aged gent next to all of this with the leap being made in the shopper’s mind that this may well be Mr Thornton himself.

And in fairness to Budgens and Mr T, this is a genuine attempt at personalizing that most impersonal of all retail experiences, the supermarket.

Even more germane is the fact that of the chains that fill most of Hampstead this is probably the only one that makes any attempt to respond to one of London’s more individual and genuine ‘villages’. But back to Eataly for a moment. For those who haven’t been, this is a temple to the “slow food” movement and, as such, has a very real “atmosphere”. Which is precisely what most modern retailers do not have - being rather more exercises in customer throughput.

A question therefore. Think, and think hard, of a chain that can really be said to have a particular atmosphere…and please think positively. Your correspondent struggles. Perhaps Signor Farinetti’s wise words really only can work if you are a relatively small and specialist operation. It would be good to think this isn’t true, but it probably is.