Non directive interviews and opinion polls show the persistence of traditional small shopkeepers owning their businesses and working with their families, trade mentality prevailing over entrepreneurial behaviour. Retailers interviewed have become so to be their «own masters». They do not want to increase the size of their business or modernize it or hire more labour. They are looking towards the past convinced of their decline. They believe in strict morals based on work and effort. If this attitude is perpetuating it is because small trade remains a possibility of social mobility for small wage earners wishing to become self employed and for the children of self employed people to stick to that social status. In other words for people with very little capital, low cultural or social background and therefore unable to adjust to capitalist management.
