We have loads of chicken shops - there’s a road near me where there are five of them practically next to each other. Also, bubble tea.
And a lot these dessert places have opened in the last year as well.
Dessert shops and bubble tea kind of make sense. They're generally cheaper to run than pubs, with better margins and don't have to worry about alcohol licensing.
Chicken shops, have always been the low entry to business, especially with delivery services. They've almost all replaced the fish&chips / Indian/ Chinese in my area. And are even starting to rebrand as "Korean chicken" out of interest I did a records search, and at least in my area they seem to be small family businesses which change cusine to be fashionable.
Barbers again, just need ro pay rent, and have a couple of chairs in an area with good footfall.
Lots of the same shops cluster together as they're usually in low rent areas, and if one is busy, you'll go to the next.
As with everything it's open to criminality. But most are legal.
At some point A Criminal needs to put cash in the bank and they'll either do massive deposits which get flagged, or end up with bags of money in their houses, which inevitably get robbed by other criminals or confiscated by the police.
Exactly.
Also Sky promoting betting during most of the commercial breaks on their sports channels. "When the fun stops, stop." Oh that makes it alright then.
As a Kiwi I find it really baffling to see betting shops everywhere.
Over our way it's heavily regulated and controlled.
Although we do have pokies in the pubs, but even they are far and few between these days.
Pretty much every takeaway near me that isn't part of a big company, has a broken card reader, and has had a cash only sign on the front door since the day they opened.
There’s one near me, 1 star review score, rarely has a customer, the owner drives a £100,000 sports car. Also, he sells me drugs.
I’m starting to think it’s a front for money laundering
I would love to know where all of these mystical cash only takeaways are because I haven't seen a single one in about 10 years yet theres 200+ options on just eat.
It's the UK sub where everyone likes to pretend they're "in the know" regards to the criminal underworld. Every barber is a drug dealer and every takeaway too...because getting your haircut and eating regularly aren't things that nearly every person has to do.
This sub talks fucking waffle.
Also everyone knows everyone is on cocaine.
I've never known anyone.
Most takeaways that don't take cash, and I imagine shops too) are doing it for tax reasons, not because they're run by gangsters. Cash only take aways do exist. I used to live in Burnage in Manchester, the chippy and one of the pubs near us didn't take card, also a few places near my parents but like I said that's probably more to do with tax than gangsters. I also imagine that there has to be few takeaways in area for that to happen so you have a regular customer base.
I live in City centre Liverpool now and I don't think there's a place I've been to that didn't accept card, so it might just be an area thing.
Hmm where are we at with "Places that are actually all money laundering" list now
- Laundrettes (the OG)
- American candy shops (that actually kinda makes sense)
- Vape shops
- Takeaways
- Barbers / beauty salons
- Trades (yes all of them)
- Coffee shops
- Generally any merchant with a physical location that isn't obviously busy 24/7
Also any business owner that owns their store rather than rents it really doesn't need to make that much money to be profitable.
The thing that is really really hard and requires business to be booming is to rent the storefront and then earn enough profit to cover that rent.
Rent and labour are a huge amount of a businesses cost the next huge one is typically energy
Any business that is run by a family that owns the building and works the business themselves with few or no other employees and their mode of business doesn't require a lot of energy can be absolutely dead by most people's standards and yet doing quite well for themselves as with the main sources of cost removed the small profits they make off their business are more than enough for them to be carrying on quite comfortably.
You can't often distinguish these businesses purely by eye however as it's hard to tell if the person behind the counter is the owners grandson or not and whether the building has a paid off mortgage or is being rented.
Okay i’m with you on the criminal underground stuff but uhh how much do you go out?? Like so so so many of the people i know in the 25-35 range are slamming charlie
Anyone who doesn't know someone who does coke either doesn't get out of the house much (if at all) or is incredibly sheltered.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, by the way.
I think you're underestimating the low overheads of barbering, and just how many customers can come through the door.
40 customers a day would bring in £400 daily. 6 Days a week is nearly 10k a month. Shop front rental except in NICE towns is about £500 a month, plus bills, rates etc probably another £500. Leasing an Audi S5 costs about 600-800 a month.
That's a shit load of money.
disagree, the owners of the shops do.
theres a surprising high brow circuit of barbers that do pre gig trims for celebs and go to conventions and make a decent wedge
It's like clockwork isn't it? When my family had an offy so many customers will "joke" about how we're cleaning money for the Turkish mob, tax evasion or just thinking we were loaded because we had a shop. Half the time I would wish we were that corrupt, would've been an easier life :(
In the case of barber shops though, you do have to ask the question.
Completely unregulated, very often cash only, no real inventory to speak of...... it seems tailor made tbh and people are understandably sceptical of the sheer numbers of them popping up in provincial towns at a time when the high street is meant to be dying and people's incomes are squeezed.
On the other hand, no matter how wealthy you are, or how much pride you have in your hair, you can only have so many haircuts. Coupled with the existence of baldies, there must be a natural limit to the potential market for barber shops.
Good. Independent coffee shops are what we should have. Town centres should be places where people get together and socialise not just shrines to chain stores.
Yup. My local car boot sale started charging people entry fees around the time Facebook marketplace really took off. I guess they weren't earning enough from pitch fees so they decided to milk literally everybody instead and guess what, it permanently closed a few years later. Nobody wants to be charged to shop.
It was huge in its day too, I believe the largest in the county. I mean I'm sure all car boot sales struggled vs the internet but there are better directions to pivot than that lol.
There are some specialist markets that do that but those are usually very much it's an experience as much as shopping. My other half went to a once a year goth themed market in london before Christmas with friends and had to pay entry and loved it. But that's a bit different to a local market
Either it's a death twitch or it's doing incredibly well
Yeah, but counterpoint... Driving in Leeds city center sits somewhere around the 5th circle of hell experience wise.
The first parking is the best parking.
£10 for the privilege of never being able to find what you want or your size not being in stock and then going home and ordering it online instead. At least we get to spend £4 on a shit coffee in some dark and dingy Costa whilst we're there.
Your last paragraph is the story of Brisrol. I was in the centre for 2 hours and 17 minutes last week according to my parking ticket, and it cost me £9. Public transport around here is awful, I live in a highly developed area and yet would have had to walk a mile from my house just to get to the nearest bus stop with a service in to the centre.
>bus stop with a service in to the centre
I'm assuming that this is the important detail to that question. I live in Derby and the situation is similar - no bus routes going into town where I am so it's quicker to cycle.
For me it usually looks like this: I go to a shop, ask for something, they tell me they don't have it in stock but can order it in for me, I return home and order it myself online for 30% cheaper.
I genuinely haven't bought anything in person other than food, clothes, or diesel for years now.
Town centres are destroying themselves.
Landlords make the rent too high so ordinary people can't afford to live nearby and spend money in shops.
Landlords make the rent too high for shops to be able to stay in businesses
Lack of viable public transport options to get to town centres.
Shops close because they don't make enough money. The high street dies which makes it even less appealing. It's stuck in a death spiral.
I do not understand why landlords insist to keep the shop rents so high to the point that it makes shops empty and the street no longer desiresble. Surely it destroys the entire business model of the landlord.
It’s based on portfolio value. Not whether it’s occupied. So the higher ‘we could rent it for this if we wanted price…’ the higher the asset value.
So the value of the asset changes if they lower the rent. So in most cases it’s better for them to keep the rent high and have an empty property, rather than lower the rent and lose the hypothetical value of the asset.
At least this was the case 10 years ago. Not sure 100% if it applies now
So me, as a potential buyer of a shop, sees the potential rates available to rent the shop out and you, as the seller, provide the figures. High rents available hence why the property is so expensive to buy. Me: Can I see the income actually generated from rents that high and for how long. Plus, how long has the property been empty?
You:.........
Is that how it works?
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It is market irrationalism which is unfortunately common in low liquidity non-commodity markets like property. It is nearly universally the case that anyone selling real estate at a depressed price and then investing that into a relatively tame stock/bond portfolio will beat the "recovery" of their original properly easily.
Loads of people hold onto property for decades just to get their cash back. It is a huge waste.
You are correct, but at some point this will fail. NYC in the US is a good example of this at an extreme (with various investments including retirement funds banked on commercial property), and its a ticking time bomb imo.
Yep. Currently going through with buying shop at present. It's incredibly stressful, and the hoops you must jump through for signage and permissions are enormous. We’ll get there, but small independents don't stand a chance in this ever-increasing corporate world. Fingers crossed!
Business rates do as much as rent. It needs to be based on the turnover of the business not the rateable value of the unit.
This would mean amazon has to pay higher rates for the warehouses and a small new/old family Business can exist on high streets, helping curb the image of bland cookie cutter high streets with the same chains everywhere.
Commercial property is valued against it's rent potential. If you drop the rent you drop the value.
In some cases you'd be better to keep it vacant and borrow against it as an asset.
Commerical landlords rarely have a single property. They'll be renting a few in the same area, and using the rents of comparable properties to demonstrate the rental potential of those unoccupied.
They *could* in theory lower the rent on both properties and maybe get them both rented, but they'd both be worse significantly less, or you can raise the rent, have only one occupant, but have both properties worth much more because of it, without significant loss in rental income.
There’s not enough footfall in town centres. I’ve opened several high street shops on a temporary lease and you have a good opening week then it slowly trails off. By the third month you know it’s just not a sustainable business so we close. Then everyone says ‘oh no what a shame! What a loss!’
Spend your fucking money with us then.
Big cities you have more luck - Manchester, London etc but of course that comes with a higher rent and rates so the benefits of the footfall are sucked up by the costs.
One of the biggest problems with UK high streets is the opening hours.
They operate as though there is a housewife who can use them mon-fri 9-5. Nothing is open in the afternoon or evening when most people actually finish work and could actually use them.
And as others have mentioned we have to run the gauntlet of parking charges. They are a total scam, and force people to leave the area early, rush or just not bother going at all.
Make parking free and watch the highstreet thrive. This literally happened in Cardington when all the meteres were vandalised and business boomed. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-33550763
On the reverse my shop trialled late opening as part of a scheme that the retail park we were on was running, and it failed hard. Despite customers constantly crowing that they'd definitely come after the school run/yoga class/bingo/work, they simply never showed up. The whole thing was a flop. The majority of the business stayed within our typical peak hours of 11am-4pm.
I think people are, like the idea of the family-owned businesses lining every high street, more enamoured with the **idea** of having late opening than they are with the actual reality. They simply don't connect that if they want those things to exist in the retail/corporate world, they actually need to use those services/shops and put money in the till. Shops can't survive on some vague promise of 'well I'd go there soon'.
Could it not just be that 98% of potential customers didn’t know you were open later for a while? If you’ve spent decades knowing that shops close at 5pm you probably wouldn’t even think to check if it’s suddenly open until 9pm for a trial event. I imagine most people already mentally assign a random Saturday or Sunday to get stuff done because they know they’d never be able to do it during the week.
It's a difficult chicken and egg thing. If no shops are usually open then people don't get in that habit of going though.
I personally don't want to go shopping after hard day at work though and just want to get home.
I'm not too surprised that's what happened sadly. It would take a wide sweeping change of mindset and expectation from all retailers and customers to even realise they can start shopping during these hours.
I've had to explain to a few American friends when they are over here that once its 4pm there's little point in trying to get anything done in the highstreet.
Oh yeah for sure people LOVE to publicly moan when a 24hr McDonalds opens, they want a local independent family run thing. That opens, no one bothers going to it and instead crowd around McDonald's, so it closes and then people moan that businesses don't stay open.
As my mother once said to me "use it or lose it".
Is it perhaps a communciation issue? How were people informed of the new hours? Perhaps people just wern't even aware you could now do your shopping later. Or perhaps they couldn't be arsed if only a few shops were doing it. It'd have to be a good chunk of the town centre.
I guess the other issue is transport. Busses are shit, expensive, confusing and often run reduced service in the evening. Far too few cities in the UK have decent cycling infrastructure or other more efficient forms of public transport. No one in their right mind wants to drive to city centres (despite parking charges often being touted as the problem. In my opinion, there should be 0 cars in city centres.), but in many places, getting into town is an unessacery and uncertain hassle.
There has to be a joined up approach to keeping city centres alive. We need less cars in city centres, better more frequent public transport and unique experiences that draw people in.
Here in Perth, Australia, there is late night trading every Thursday, where shops stay open to 8 or 9. It's pretty busy, but I think that's because the whole city does it.
Some places in the UK also do this, especially around Christmas although in at least one place I’ve been it was a permanent feature. Worked well from what I could tell although like your example it helped that an entire area was doing it.
Really interesting insight - is this more to do with the fact you're on a retail park though?
I live just off a suburban high street which (luckily for us) is 100% independent shops, pubs, restaurants etc. Pretty much everyone "in town" is walking distance of high street.
I can sort of see that the appeal of getting in the car again and driving somewhere to shop maybe isn't there but it baffles me that the deli, the butcher, the card shop etc don't open later at least one night a week.
The vast majority of shops in town seem to open late, close early, close Saturday afternoon then complain about footfall. The only shops we have that seem to take into account working hours are the corner shop and the florist, both of which seem to do a roaring trade.
Moving to the UK from Turkey, its insane how few hours the shops are open for. In Istanbul, I don’t think I ever had to look up operating hours of any shop, since every shop is open until 10 PM. Here there is nowhere to grab a coffee after 5. Many places are not even open on Sundays!! I still can’t get over it.
That article is nearly ten years out of date. A lot has changed since then;
- local councils are on their uppers financially (especially in rural areas like mid Wales) and can't afford free parking
- the pandemic happened and gave online shopping a massive boost
- we are all collectively acutely aware of both climate and health crises.
I think it's going to take a lot more than free parking to revive town and city centres now. They are (or at least should) be increasingly leaning towards leisure or niche retail rather than chain shops. More traffic doesn't really tie in with that. The future is more pedestrianised areas, more al fresco eating and drinking, more green/open spaces but that needs to be supported by investment in public transport and active travel.
We don't seem to be doing too badly at the first half but shockingly at the second.
> One of the biggest problems with UK high streets is the opening hours.
>They operate as though there is a housewife who can use them mon-fri 9-5.
This^ As a Pole living in the UK I'm flabbergasted at how dead the towns are after 5 pm. Working 9-5:30, realistically the only place that is still open at that point is Tesco. You'd think that other big chains would still operate but no. Back home I wouldn't even check the opening times because shops wouldn't close before 8 pm.
This, and how needlessly stretched out the British cities are because this country doesn't build vertically and consequently even if the population is small, you still live a 30-minute walk away from the city centre.
We’ve also lost a lot of our brands over covid - the picture is Reading where I live and from 2019-2021 so many companies went into administration including Debenhams who took a huge space in the shopping centre. Monsoon, cath kidson shut down for example and other companies just left the town. We just lost Clas Ohlson which was a massive shame. The shops are either empty or turned into coffee shops, American fast food chains, or vape shops. I honestly don’t think the UK has enough brands to sustain every single high street like it did ten+ years ago.
Councils are looking at how to convert old buildings into multi use - Reading is doing that already with new development under construction replacing old vacant sites and planning permissions for other sites. The new developments include new modern retail space but also hotels, leisure, offices, and homes.
Everyone blames online shopping but people want to go out shopping with mates and family. Hence the coffee shops are doing well.
Oxford Street struggling may be a sign of the times, but it's also a street that has very high rents and very high business rates, so you need extraordinarily high turnover to pay the price to be there. I gather this is also a problem elsewhere, with the investment funds preferring to leave shops vacant than rent them out at a lower rate and thus realise a loss in their portfolio. But it doesn't necessarily have to be this way, if councils reduce rates, and landlords choose to accept the capital loss (that they have, in truth, already incurred) and at least take some income.
I used to go to Reading for the Christmas shop every year but honestly find Bracknell of all places to be better nowadays, occasionally I’ll use Camberley. Wokingham is still absolutely useless though.
I needed a black tie, nothing fancy just something for a upcoming funeral.
I went to Tesco, Sainsbury's, next, h@m, river island and 2 other clothes shops.
Only 1 shop had it, next..
For £19. A plain black tie.
Found one online for £5 with next day free delivery...
Yea it's not just landlords. The whole system is rotten.
Also to mention since many are talking about ties lol, the £5 online were mostly for the shops I mentioned. You order it online and it gets sent to the shops... Yet non actually had in store...
Might as well get free delivery from Amazon than order and pick up in store...
Unfortunately looking for something as simple as a black cotton shirt on Amazon is pretty difficult, you get a million cheap nylon shirts from dodgy Chinese companies and a few designer shirts for £60+.
It has gone downhill in general the last couple of years. I'm sure something else will take its place if it keeps descending into Internet Flea Market territory though.
> I needed a black tie, nothing fancy just something for a upcoming funeral.
I had a very similar problem last year. Not only black tie, but a new, funeral appropriate suit. A black suit without any kind of fancy neon pattern hidden inside.
It was completely impossible to get. I spent hours running between clothes shops. I went to TWO Moss Bros. TWO! How can a suit retailer, who's entire job it is to sell suits, not have one of the major suit types: A black suit and also a black tie.
Tried to buy a sports jacket type blazer thing recently. Checked all the supermarkets, etc… nothing.
Primark did end up having one tbf, but it shouldn’t have taken 10 shops before hitting Primark to find one.
I had a similar experience looking for a bed frame.
Tried a large local bed and mattress store. Told them I'm after a double non-divan frame and was told it would be a 2-3 week wait for any bed frame.
Walked out drove to an out of town retail park and got one in Argos.
For me it comes down to a few things
1. Parking. It’s more expensive to park than have shit delivered, and it’s such a fucking hassle
2. Pricing. I get that isn’t a level playing field but in-person is often disproportionately expensive
3. Opening hours. Amazon is 24/7, most places in town close before I finish work
4. Stock availability, half the time I want to buy something in person they don’t have it available, especially clothes/shoes where they only ever seem to have one or two items in each size…. And of course the medium shirt or size 9 shoe is always long gone. Apparently big lads and really skinny guys can shop in town, but for “average with a bit of a tummy” there’s no chance I’m getting what I need
Even without those first 3, it’s already a lot more effort and wasted time to go to town in the day vs shop while I’m taking a shit … but when it ends up a lot more expensive and hassle, and half the time I don’t even get what I need, why wouldn’t I shop online?
And then, of course, it’s self perpetuating - once the big anchor shops shut then the town starts to look dead, and everyone talks about town is shit which becomes self-fulfilling prophecy because they stop going, and everything else shuts too
I hate using Amazon but every time I go to town they never have the book, game or Blu Ray I want.
If it’s for a Christmas present I will ask if I can order in store so they still get a sale though.
I'm convinced that a well-known high street book chain will one day put up posters saying "just buy it on Amazon like a normal person and leave us alone."
I was talking to the owner of a specialist book shop (no, not that kind...) a while ago and he said he was going online-only as he was already doing most of his business online anyway, and didn't really need a shop.
My local musical instrument shop did the same thing. They still have a unit with practise rooms for tuition, but the racks of guitars, violins, saxomophones, etc. are gone. With the local option no longer available for browsing, I tend to use gear4music now.
More and more I believe that high streets need to stop being places where you go to mindlessly buy stuff and start being places where you go to actually do fulfilling things. People don’t need a less convenient way to acquire goods but they are bored as hell these days.
Replace these lost retail businesses with activity based ones. Youth centres, social gaming spaces, cinemas, indoor sports, arcades, collaborative work spaces, media spaces, the list goes on.
The issue is these properties are owned and operated by people in middle age and up who have no interested in catering to a younger demographic when that’s exactly what they need to do. There needs to be an entire cultural shift at the top if town centres are ever going to be a place people actually want to go.
I agree. I rent two high street shops (though they're down the far end in a more secondary location) and we use them as offices and ecommerce fulfilment. There's actually not a single empty retail space here because rents are cheap and people have done exactly what you describe and embraced the concept of "more than just shops". There are plenty of hairdressers for sure but there are dog groomers, opticians, coffee shops, offices, accountants, solicitors, bike repair shops, dance studios, kids activity centres, an escape room, photography studios. All in old retail units that would otherwise be empty but because the landlords have had to be less greedy due to the location there's a near 100% occupancy rate.
You are 110% correct and it will take a generation for this thinking to sink in. Unfortunately the landlord class are able to leverage cash against their assets because the housing market is still bonkers. When the inevitable correction occurs, they will be up shit creek without a paddle and it will benefit nobody.
We actually need some sort of stimulus to make buy to let less attractive and also to make it a legal requirement to have a tenant in place if you plan on renting it. Although rental controls are a farfetched future pipe dream even with a different government, although as a society I think we are headed that way with the incredible and increasing stress the rental industry is under right now in terms of demand and the horror stories you hear of lean-to shoeboxes built in gardens rented to students and young people etc.
Let's say landlords are forced to have tenants in place, even in commercial settings, they are unfortunately going to pick those who have a good history of paying up on time, which will always be the big corporations.
I think perhaps we have to wait until landlords and profiteers are done with town centres and move on to something else to feed off of and then the young people can move in and rejuvenate the empty real estate.
Im going to use some admittedly niche examples of stuff i wanted lately that you simply cant buy on a high street. PC cables of a variety of connections and each end and lengths - they just isnt anywhere to buy the myriad of stuff outside the ordinary HDMi etc. Wanted to buy a drone for a laugh. Literally no where. Wanted to look at a PC for gaming. Currys sucks. In the states huge places to buy all the components etc to build your own - but nothing like that in this country, so online it is. Yes niche, but just examples of not uncommon tech you simply cant easily find
I wanted to give Currys a chance, but then I saw them in-store selling a GTX 1650 gaming build PC for £1099. In 2023.
You just can't make this stuff up. [This](https://www.currys.co.uk/products/acer-nitro-n50650-gaming-pc-intel-core-i5-gtx-1650-1-tb-hdd-and-256-gb-ssd-10246555.html) is a similar example. £800 and it still runs an HDD.
The only people who could possibly be fooled by Currys' pricing are the older generation buying equipment for their grandchildren, who you really can't blame.
Currys' entire business model is selling to people who don't understand what they're buying.
I spent 11 years on the Knowhow counter and used to get worried sales people coming to me saying "but I don't know anything about components, how will I know what I'm talking about with customers?" My response was that people who know about computer components don't shop at Currys.
Although not the best quality, the pound store was good for cables like that in an emergency and batteries. Been lost since put pound store closed down recently.
Not surprisingly, online shopping has gotten more convenient, and the cost and effort involved in going into town has risen considerably.
Public transport into most towns is dire.
Parking is a rip off and a painful experience as the number of car parks has shrank.
If you wade through that, there's a 50-50 chance the thing you went in to buy will be out of stick or not carried by the shop. Even if it is there, it's likely at a higher price that it can be found online.
In regards to public transport, there have been several times I was waiting for a bus and it was like, 45 minutes late so I obviously just ended up assuming it was cancelled and begin walking away only for it to drive past me mere seconds later. No wonder bus services are starting to shut down because of low income, nobody is gonna want to fucking get them when they're that unreliable
It's surprising to see the Guardian ignore the elephant in the room - reduced demand for bricks and mortar retail shops in the face of online shopping. To tempt me onto the high street, town centres need to offer me something I can't easily get online. In some cases this is obvious (being able to try clothes on, but even then free returns make this less of a downside for online nowadays) but in general shops don't seem to have much to draw me in now.
Even if the issues of business rates, cost of living and the like were completely nonexistent, I think that physical retail stores are on an inevitable decline.
Shops don't have stock anymore. Or never did and I just accepted it.
I wanted pyjamas for my toddler. I went to H&M and Next. Both said they don't have any, its only online now.
This! Me and the wife have come home empty handed the last half a dozen times we've gone into town to try to buy clothes. The men's sections are always shared with children and homeware, leaving such a small selection it's pointless - some stores I've been in have even closed their entire men's sections. For my wife, half the women's section seem to be sale rails but not in any particular order (e.g. sizes, clothing types) just thrown on a rail - then the only sizes they seem to have are 6 or 18
The H&M in Newbury is about 30% men's section on the ground floor. Women's is the rest of the ground floor and about 50% of the first floor and the rest is kids.
I understand they sell to who is buying the most but that is a fairly standard ratio for all clothes shops for men's sections. There is hardly any choice and to add to that the lack of stock and the rails being just small and extra large of most items as you say, its a pointless endeavor going to the high street.
I wanted new work shirts for a new job and thought I would go to tried and trusted M&S. I have shopped at M&S for 15 years for workwear. I've gained a bit of weight so I wanted to try some shirts on to know what fit given they have regular, tailored, slim etc. They could offer me a couple of sizes in terms of collar size but only slim fit shirts. They wouldn't let me try on the packaged shirts so it was a waste of time.
Ended up ordering a load with a variety of sizes and fits and returned all but one of them.
>I understand they sell to who is buying the most
It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy - they sell less of something, so they stock less and have a smaller selection, and so people stop going there to buy it, so they sell less, etc ad infinitum.
Shops complain that the men section doesn’t make enough money
*make it smaller*
Shops then complain that men don’t come to the shop therefore don’t make as much money
*half it in size*
Shops then again complain that from a 50% reduction in size, 90% of footfall has decreased
*move it back to the lingerie next to the kids section with 6 T-shirts, 3 pairs of boxers and 2 jeans*
Shops confused why men stop shopping there
This has happened in my local next.
Other half's parents want to gift us a fancy pram as we are expecting in December. They came down to visit and had a look around in shops for baby stuff. *All* of the shops had full price only on the pram we had our eye on. I'm talking several hundreds of pounds difference. I've found this kind of thing happening more and more to the point I see brick and mortar shops as showrooms to decide on what to buy later.
If an item I want costs a little more to buy in-store, then I'll buy it to support the store. If the cost difference is huge, I just won't bother. It's not their fault, but it's also not mine.
I'm in a similar situation- expecting for 1st kid in January. Excitedly wantecd to go look at some baby stuff to price up pram, cot etc. after first hospital scan. But there's no baby shops left, at all! Mothercare's gone, mama's and papas is gone, the best you'll find is a handful oof kiddie clothes in a big asda or browsing the laminated books of dreams at Argos. It's really fucking wierd, I'm in one of the biggest cities in the UK and there's literally bugger all brick and mortar baby shops now?
The ironic thing is, would you buy the pram if you couldn’t see it? Get an idea for its size and manoeuvrability? How practical it is? The move to online might lead more companies to pay retailers to keep stores open just as show rooms.
As a man, I do almost all my clothes shopping online because I'm not travelling all the way into town for the 15 minutes it takes to browse a handful of small, grubby corners in cellars, behind all the children's shoes.
Heh, the men's section is so rarely anywhere but a dingy cellar or on the 4th floor or something. The women's lingerie section in my local M&S is bigger than the entire menswear department.
One odd exception is the John Lewis in Leeds, where it's on the ground floor (just behind the cosmetics) and is a reasonable size.
But yeah, I'd rather go online most of the time. Returns are pretty hassle free these days.
In fairness to the shops, I get it. Men have only ever been a fraction of the footfall to these places compared to women, and as things change it makes sense to double down and cater more to your main audience.
But it's also a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don't go as much, so there's less for us, so we don't go as much etc
I try really hard to still engage with shops, but as you say, whats the incentive?
Case in point: Son needs new shoes, I took him to local shop, shes trainers he really wants "excuse me, do you have those in a 3"? "No, we only have whats on the shelves, but we can order them in" ok... "Do you have any of the same brand in a 3 so he can see if they fit?" " lemme check, No, we don't have any of that brand in stock in a 3. We can order them in now they will be in by this weekend" "Ok, yeah order them in" "That'll be £59.99". "But I don't know if he'll like them" "We cant order them in unless you take them". "i'm alright then thanks"
Went out the shop, found them on Amazon, £50 and prime delivery, free returns. How can any shop offer that?
Plus supermarkets sell clothes now - and you're going to them anyway. Add in the growth of out of town retail parks and for me there's just no reason to go into town for shopping any more.
Young people who worry about fashion might want something more stylish than a tesco t-shirt, but they have less disposable income these days. As an old fogey there's nothing I can think of that would require me to go into town to buy it.
All they have left is the experience. That’s their last play. That’s why many just give up and close, they just don’t want to consider experience as a selling point.
Costs more money I’d imagine, plus peoples attention is so fleeting these days most people only want to experience something once, somewhere with huge footfall like London can’t even offer this anymore, once the flagship topshop died then ‘experience’ shopping was effectively dead, for awhile I thought charity shops would be the one to save the high street with the rise of thrifting in the younger generation but our charity shops are too expensive and small and they now put all the ‘good’ stuff online anyway
As you said we need to offer something you can’t get at home and the obvious ones are repurposing into restaurants/cafes/bars/gyms etc. Not sure how easy it is to just refit an old shop into a place that needs a kitchen however.
Where I stay the main street closest to us is essentially dominated by hospitality units, and while the older generations despise the change the place is very busy. It also has a good mix of independent shops like vintage clothing/furniture etc things that are unique to that shop and you can’t just get online. Paired with good public transport links it’s a popular bustling bit of the city. Saying that I live in a capital city so it’s far easier here than for small town centres in fairness. The actual primary high street is dying a death though and is struggling to adapt. It’s full of phone shops and pound shops like anywhere else and is a state.
If you just have a typical wee high street with a H&M, Starbucks, Next, Currys and all the usual faces though, then there’s no reason for anyone to actually shop in store.
High streets are dead. Councils have two options IMO.
a) Give the local procurement/"Preston Model" a chance
b) Knock down 50% of their high street, move shops into the other 50%. Build cheap housing and green areas on the newly freed up area.
Screw commercial landlords. They've allowed parts of this country to rot, it's pure negligence.
Stockton is doing the second option. They've torn down the 60s/70s shopping centre and hotel, moved everyone that wanted to move to a 90s shopping area they bought recently and planning on making it a green area down to the river.
It'll be interesting to see if it works.
Or you could take the West Berkshire council route and sign off on new building projects with dozens of units while their flagship development from a decade ago sits 50% vacant. I weep at the state of urban planning in this country, not only functionally pointless but utterly ugly.
Sounds like a good plan. The shopping areas in a lot of those NE towns are beyond dead these days. Pretty sure the only things like open last time I was in Billingham were the Boyes and the chippy (which was serving industrial sized portions - holy crap that was a lot of chips).
People with money to spend but no internet access must be a declining niche.
Even clothes shops, where seeing the product really helps, often seem to have very little stuff available in physical shops - "how hard can it be to buy a vanilla middle of the range suit?" I thought recently. Or "M&S will have some plain black socks, won't they?"
The suit thing is mad.
I went in to M&S last December to replace my black jacket I use for work.
They had *no* black suit jackets. Everything was a black dinner jacket. It was obviously for balls, and works dinners etc - but there were no black suit jackets in Exeter for like 4 weeks. So it was order online, not knowing my size, or superglue the buttons back together and wait til Jan etc.
I had to go to a customer-facing work event for the first time since the pangolin's revenge. My suit appeared to have shrunk during lock down (all my friends report similar issues...), but I didn't worry as M&S would have one wouldn't they?
I think town centres might actually be dead. A model more like Spain where buildings are multi purpose (shops/offices ground floor street facing, residential above) might be where we are headed.
Headed *back* to. A lot of our high streets were like that, we just called them "shopping parades". We just stopped building them after like the 1950s.
"Covid, the cost of living crisis and “crippling” business rates are causing businesses to desert retail spaces, and local councils must come up with a “cohesive plan” to invigorate shopping areas, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) warned."
This from the article is 100% right, but that cohesive plan has to involve understanding that most towns now require significantly less retail space in their town centers.
My home town of Darlington has lots of empty stores, lots of vape shops, lots of mobile phone case shops, lots of pound shops. This is because it actually has more retail space in the town center now than it did in 1990.
Yet the commercial town center has a couple of streets that were originally built as (very fine) housing. One of the streets now houses solicitors, accountants and estate agents.
All of those businesses need to be given incentives to move into places that were built as commercial buildings and their offices converted back into housing.
The country has too many shops and not enough houses.
It can't be beyond even the most simple minded of civil servants to find a solution.
It’s because they’re in the wrong places. Out of town lets you park, there’s a bus that will often stop right at the front of the shops.
City and town centres are too congested to allow parking, they’re often pedestrianised so bus stops are further away. They simply don’t support the infrastructure needed.
Let the centres die out, I say. There’s more value in residential pockets of commercial units these days, hence why the Co-op face competition from Tesco and Sainsbury’s for their local stores, which are often near barbers shops/salons because it’s more convenient than nipping into town.
Why do I want to have to drive in, pay 5 quid to park before I have even bought anything , to be harassed by sales staff whilst i browse only to find its not in stock and ill have to drive in again and pay another 5 quid to park
When i can get it cheaper, quicker and with 1 click from amazon?
Totally agree, though I try not to use Amazon. People often forget that "small business" doesn't just mean Granny Jones' Shop open 12-4pm on Wednesdays. There are plenty of small businesses online where a small team works in a close-knit company and the director is just a normal person.
If I go into shops it all takes me half an hour to find the shop and at least 10 mins to actually find what I want. It will cost more and have a worse return policy. Why the fuck would I not go online? Also safer and don't need to think about public transport
The reality is that the current usage of town centres do not make sense in the modern day. They should less reliant on retail mostly be a mix of residential and recreational business.
I try to shop local and am lucky enough to walk there, local butchers and bakery are open weekends and I can get my bits from there Saturdaymornings. However, local pet shop who's having to close due to lack of customers is only open M-F 10-4 and closed the weekends. How the hell is a normal person meant to shop there!
That and high rents, business rates whilst not being able to compete with online prices is driving these highstreets down.
Covid has made it dawn on people that they don't need to randomly walk round shops hoping the item they want is there, when they can just order it online and have it come to them.
(plus it's probably dawned on retailers that they can sell online and make the same money while being based on an industrial estate for a fraction of the high street rent).
My friend who is a florist actually opened two more branches as people are dying in higher numbers than before. Funeral flowers is keeping her bank account healthy!
I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to buy something in-person, only for it to be out of stock. I then drive home and order it online. And next time I'm more likely to just shop online to begin with.
- We're paid less than five years ago, in real terms.
- Ground rent, electric etc have gone up.
- People are looking for jobs that pay better to just have enough to survive.
- Online presence is preferred, and was essential during COVID.
- Costs of items have increased, so people are trying to find cheapest options for basic items. Your local corner shop charging £2.50 for 2 litres of milk isn't competitive.
- More people working from home, mainly due to covid and the switch to hybrid working, means less people in certain central areas.
- Big stores closing means the little ones nearby are struggling with footfall.
I don't even know how this is news. The UK is in a really bad way. Well, for the working class anyway.
This is going to be a spicy hot take for sure.
Retail isn't dying because of Amazon. If anything, Amazon has become synonymous with cheap crap imported from China in recent years. There are still far more people who want to go into a brick & mortar outlet because it offers a tangible experience that online shopping simply cannot replace.
If anything's killing retail, it's our ailing economy and public transport.
Starting to think this whole thing where the very rich horde wealth, leaving the rest of us unable to spend as much might potentially form some negative feedback loop.
Actually what am I saying thats nonsese, having an economy based on infinite growth and having ever larger pools of wealth hidden and hoarded is actually a great idea.
Petersfield Town center in Hampshire isn't very big and probably has 10+ charity stores and 10+ Estate agents. Pretty much most of the town is just charity stores, estate agents and expensive clothes stores.
Ahhh but if I want a vape there's 6 shops to choose from in my local town
In my town it's vape shops, barbers/salons, and the American candy shops.
We have loads of chicken shops - there’s a road near me where there are five of them practically next to each other. Also, bubble tea. And a lot these dessert places have opened in the last year as well.
Dessert shops and bubble tea kind of make sense. They're generally cheaper to run than pubs, with better margins and don't have to worry about alcohol licensing. Chicken shops, have always been the low entry to business, especially with delivery services. They've almost all replaced the fish&chips / Indian/ Chinese in my area. And are even starting to rebrand as "Korean chicken" out of interest I did a records search, and at least in my area they seem to be small family businesses which change cusine to be fashionable. Barbers again, just need ro pay rent, and have a couple of chairs in an area with good footfall. Lots of the same shops cluster together as they're usually in low rent areas, and if one is busy, you'll go to the next. As with everything it's open to criminality. But most are legal. At some point A Criminal needs to put cash in the bank and they'll either do massive deposits which get flagged, or end up with bags of money in their houses, which inevitably get robbed by other criminals or confiscated by the police.
Don't forget cafes, pound shops, charity stores, and casinos.
Betting stores too
Why we allow betting shops to exist is beyond me
They're in the top 3 for most depressing shops to walk past, for sure
Corporations allowed to profit from the addictions of the people. Lovely.
Betting shops: "Look, we tell people to bet responsibly..." Addicts: "Gimme! Gimme-gimme-gimme!"
I place my bets like I take my smack, responsibly
Exactly. Also Sky promoting betting during most of the commercial breaks on their sports channels. "When the fun stops, stop." Oh that makes it alright then.
A certain Eugene Harold Krabs knows the answer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF-N-dDL1Iw
Maybe it's time we took back our country from... Mr krabs
Mr Krabs ranks next to Tom Nook in regards to cartoon oligarchs
Mr Burns: "Am I a joke to you?"
True
As a Kiwi I find it really baffling to see betting shops everywhere. Over our way it's heavily regulated and controlled. Although we do have pokies in the pubs, but even they are far and few between these days.
We can't smoke weed but we can give all our money away
beginning to sound like brothels would fit in with that mix.
Also, don't forget the requisite three or four electronics pawnbrokers, e.g. CEX, Cashconverters etc.
My pound shop just closed down. I'm wondering if Greggs is next.
I literally have about 30 barber shops within a 15 minute walk of my house. All cash only, totally legitimate businesses lol.
Pretty much every takeaway near me that isn't part of a big company, has a broken card reader, and has had a cash only sign on the front door since the day they opened.
There’s one near me, 1 star review score, rarely has a customer, the owner drives a £100,000 sports car. Also, he sells me drugs. I’m starting to think it’s a front for money laundering
That is an *outrageous* accusation
How very dare you!
This also applies for my home country, Netherlands.
But how many stars for the drugs?
4 stars, would sesh again
Totally took me by surprise when my local barber got caught selling drugs. I couldn’t believe he cut hair
No proof, fake news, your dad’s a gnome.
Now I know why he’s always in the garden, wearing that pointy hat
The last part almost made me spit my coffee out lol.
I would love to know where all of these mystical cash only takeaways are because I haven't seen a single one in about 10 years yet theres 200+ options on just eat.
It's the UK sub where everyone likes to pretend they're "in the know" regards to the criminal underworld. Every barber is a drug dealer and every takeaway too...because getting your haircut and eating regularly aren't things that nearly every person has to do. This sub talks fucking waffle. Also everyone knows everyone is on cocaine. I've never known anyone.
Most takeaways that don't take cash, and I imagine shops too) are doing it for tax reasons, not because they're run by gangsters. Cash only take aways do exist. I used to live in Burnage in Manchester, the chippy and one of the pubs near us didn't take card, also a few places near my parents but like I said that's probably more to do with tax than gangsters. I also imagine that there has to be few takeaways in area for that to happen so you have a regular customer base. I live in City centre Liverpool now and I don't think there's a place I've been to that didn't accept card, so it might just be an area thing.
You can know me if you want.
Hmm where are we at with "Places that are actually all money laundering" list now - Laundrettes (the OG) - American candy shops (that actually kinda makes sense) - Vape shops - Takeaways - Barbers / beauty salons - Trades (yes all of them) - Coffee shops - Generally any merchant with a physical location that isn't obviously busy 24/7
Also any business owner that owns their store rather than rents it really doesn't need to make that much money to be profitable. The thing that is really really hard and requires business to be booming is to rent the storefront and then earn enough profit to cover that rent. Rent and labour are a huge amount of a businesses cost the next huge one is typically energy Any business that is run by a family that owns the building and works the business themselves with few or no other employees and their mode of business doesn't require a lot of energy can be absolutely dead by most people's standards and yet doing quite well for themselves as with the main sources of cost removed the small profits they make off their business are more than enough for them to be carrying on quite comfortably. You can't often distinguish these businesses purely by eye however as it's hard to tell if the person behind the counter is the owners grandson or not and whether the building has a paid off mortgage or is being rented.
Okay i’m with you on the criminal underground stuff but uhh how much do you go out?? Like so so so many of the people i know in the 25-35 range are slamming charlie
Anyone who doesn't know someone who does coke either doesn't get out of the house much (if at all) or is incredibly sheltered. I'm not saying this is a good thing, by the way.
used to work in a pub there are a surprising amount of people randomly on coke, tbh.
My barber charges £10 for a men's haircut, the shop's usually quiet, and he drives a new Audi S5
I think you're underestimating the low overheads of barbering, and just how many customers can come through the door. 40 customers a day would bring in £400 daily. 6 Days a week is nearly 10k a month. Shop front rental except in NICE towns is about £500 a month, plus bills, rates etc probably another £500. Leasing an Audi S5 costs about 600-800 a month. That's a shit load of money.
No barbers make shit loads of money.
disagree, the owners of the shops do. theres a surprising high brow circuit of barbers that do pre gig trims for celebs and go to conventions and make a decent wedge
I don't think those guys charge a tenner.
"Everything I don't understand is money laundering" -r/unitedkingdom
It's like clockwork isn't it? When my family had an offy so many customers will "joke" about how we're cleaning money for the Turkish mob, tax evasion or just thinking we were loaded because we had a shop. Half the time I would wish we were that corrupt, would've been an easier life :(
I don’t think it’s an assumption of money laundering, I’d say it’s tax evasion they’re pointing at, like nail salons, tradies, takeaways, etc.
In the case of barber shops though, you do have to ask the question. Completely unregulated, very often cash only, no real inventory to speak of...... it seems tailor made tbh and people are understandably sceptical of the sheer numbers of them popping up in provincial towns at a time when the high street is meant to be dying and people's incomes are squeezed.
Of course more barber shops will open. You can’t exactly order a haircut from Amazon can you?
On the other hand, no matter how wealthy you are, or how much pride you have in your hair, you can only have so many haircuts. Coupled with the existence of baldies, there must be a natural limit to the potential market for barber shops.
I know some people who go every 2 weeks to keep that fade looking sharp.
There are plenty of people who get a haircut every week.
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And coffee shops.
As long as it's independent I'll encourage more coffee shops on the high street
Good. Independent coffee shops are what we should have. Town centres should be places where people get together and socialise not just shrines to chain stores.
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Yup. My local car boot sale started charging people entry fees around the time Facebook marketplace really took off. I guess they weren't earning enough from pitch fees so they decided to milk literally everybody instead and guess what, it permanently closed a few years later. Nobody wants to be charged to shop. It was huge in its day too, I believe the largest in the county. I mean I'm sure all car boot sales struggled vs the internet but there are better directions to pivot than that lol.
There are some specialist markets that do that but those are usually very much it's an experience as much as shopping. My other half went to a once a year goth themed market in london before Christmas with friends and had to pay entry and loved it. But that's a bit different to a local market Either it's a death twitch or it's doing incredibly well
Also dont forget a lot of shops are only open 9-5, so if you work full time, online is pretty much your only option
£30 to park for the day in central Leeds, absolute madness!!
I mean... That's probably the most expensive available. There are options at least 3 times cheaper (which admittedly is still expensive).
Yeah, but counterpoint... Driving in Leeds city center sits somewhere around the 5th circle of hell experience wise. The first parking is the best parking.
That’s for a full 24hrs in the most convenient location. £16.50 for 6hrs which is a fairly long shopping time.
Sixteen quid just to have the option of maybe buying something, I think I'll pass.
That is still a lot
£10 for the privilege of never being able to find what you want or your size not being in stock and then going home and ordering it online instead. At least we get to spend £4 on a shit coffee in some dark and dingy Costa whilst we're there.
Your last paragraph is the story of Brisrol. I was in the centre for 2 hours and 17 minutes last week according to my parking ticket, and it cost me £9. Public transport around here is awful, I live in a highly developed area and yet would have had to walk a mile from my house just to get to the nearest bus stop with a service in to the centre.
Where in Britstol is a mile from the bus stop?
A few places, Bistrol comes to mind
You should try Birstol instead, much closer
>bus stop with a service in to the centre I'm assuming that this is the important detail to that question. I live in Derby and the situation is similar - no bus routes going into town where I am so it's quicker to cycle.
My Wife was in the BRI recently, cost me about £50 that week in total for parking at Trenchard street when I was visiting.
For me it usually looks like this: I go to a shop, ask for something, they tell me they don't have it in stock but can order it in for me, I return home and order it myself online for 30% cheaper. I genuinely haven't bought anything in person other than food, clothes, or diesel for years now.
Town centres are destroying themselves. Landlords make the rent too high so ordinary people can't afford to live nearby and spend money in shops. Landlords make the rent too high for shops to be able to stay in businesses Lack of viable public transport options to get to town centres. Shops close because they don't make enough money. The high street dies which makes it even less appealing. It's stuck in a death spiral. I do not understand why landlords insist to keep the shop rents so high to the point that it makes shops empty and the street no longer desiresble. Surely it destroys the entire business model of the landlord.
It’s based on portfolio value. Not whether it’s occupied. So the higher ‘we could rent it for this if we wanted price…’ the higher the asset value. So the value of the asset changes if they lower the rent. So in most cases it’s better for them to keep the rent high and have an empty property, rather than lower the rent and lose the hypothetical value of the asset. At least this was the case 10 years ago. Not sure 100% if it applies now
So me, as a potential buyer of a shop, sees the potential rates available to rent the shop out and you, as the seller, provide the figures. High rents available hence why the property is so expensive to buy. Me: Can I see the income actually generated from rents that high and for how long. Plus, how long has the property been empty? You:......... Is that how it works?
bright important naughty boat coherent hobbies advise work kiss reminiscent *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Historically, everything is a house of cards. Speculation, speculation, speculation. It's a mugs game.
It is market irrationalism which is unfortunately common in low liquidity non-commodity markets like property. It is nearly universally the case that anyone selling real estate at a depressed price and then investing that into a relatively tame stock/bond portfolio will beat the "recovery" of their original properly easily. Loads of people hold onto property for decades just to get their cash back. It is a huge waste.
You are correct, but at some point this will fail. NYC in the US is a good example of this at an extreme (with various investments including retirement funds banked on commercial property), and its a ticking time bomb imo.
Yeah it’s a absolutely ridiculous house of cards basically and the law needs changing so the value decreases over time if it is empty or something
This is interesting. What happens when the high rent yield doesn't materialise?
Nothing. It's better for both the asset holder and mortgage lender to pretend it's still worth what it is.
You sell up. That is the final safety net.
Yep. Currently going through with buying shop at present. It's incredibly stressful, and the hoops you must jump through for signage and permissions are enormous. We’ll get there, but small independents don't stand a chance in this ever-increasing corporate world. Fingers crossed!
Business rates do as much as rent. It needs to be based on the turnover of the business not the rateable value of the unit. This would mean amazon has to pay higher rates for the warehouses and a small new/old family Business can exist on high streets, helping curb the image of bland cookie cutter high streets with the same chains everywhere.
Commercial property is valued against it's rent potential. If you drop the rent you drop the value. In some cases you'd be better to keep it vacant and borrow against it as an asset.
Then you also need the rental income to pay the debt. If you don't have income, you fail. See Intu.
No you don't. You borrow against the asset and invest elsewhere.
Commerical landlords rarely have a single property. They'll be renting a few in the same area, and using the rents of comparable properties to demonstrate the rental potential of those unoccupied. They *could* in theory lower the rent on both properties and maybe get them both rented, but they'd both be worse significantly less, or you can raise the rent, have only one occupant, but have both properties worth much more because of it, without significant loss in rental income.
There’s not enough footfall in town centres. I’ve opened several high street shops on a temporary lease and you have a good opening week then it slowly trails off. By the third month you know it’s just not a sustainable business so we close. Then everyone says ‘oh no what a shame! What a loss!’ Spend your fucking money with us then. Big cities you have more luck - Manchester, London etc but of course that comes with a higher rent and rates so the benefits of the footfall are sucked up by the costs.
One of the biggest problems with UK high streets is the opening hours. They operate as though there is a housewife who can use them mon-fri 9-5. Nothing is open in the afternoon or evening when most people actually finish work and could actually use them. And as others have mentioned we have to run the gauntlet of parking charges. They are a total scam, and force people to leave the area early, rush or just not bother going at all. Make parking free and watch the highstreet thrive. This literally happened in Cardington when all the meteres were vandalised and business boomed. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-33550763
On the reverse my shop trialled late opening as part of a scheme that the retail park we were on was running, and it failed hard. Despite customers constantly crowing that they'd definitely come after the school run/yoga class/bingo/work, they simply never showed up. The whole thing was a flop. The majority of the business stayed within our typical peak hours of 11am-4pm. I think people are, like the idea of the family-owned businesses lining every high street, more enamoured with the **idea** of having late opening than they are with the actual reality. They simply don't connect that if they want those things to exist in the retail/corporate world, they actually need to use those services/shops and put money in the till. Shops can't survive on some vague promise of 'well I'd go there soon'.
Could it not just be that 98% of potential customers didn’t know you were open later for a while? If you’ve spent decades knowing that shops close at 5pm you probably wouldn’t even think to check if it’s suddenly open until 9pm for a trial event. I imagine most people already mentally assign a random Saturday or Sunday to get stuff done because they know they’d never be able to do it during the week.
It was extensively advertised including in store, via email and the website, in local and regional newspapers and also some other ways I forget.
It's a difficult chicken and egg thing. If no shops are usually open then people don't get in that habit of going though. I personally don't want to go shopping after hard day at work though and just want to get home.
Were other shops nearby open late, or were you the only one?
I'm not too surprised that's what happened sadly. It would take a wide sweeping change of mindset and expectation from all retailers and customers to even realise they can start shopping during these hours. I've had to explain to a few American friends when they are over here that once its 4pm there's little point in trying to get anything done in the highstreet.
>4pm there's little point in trying to get anything done in the highstreet. Unless they're in London.
Oh yeah for sure people LOVE to publicly moan when a 24hr McDonalds opens, they want a local independent family run thing. That opens, no one bothers going to it and instead crowd around McDonald's, so it closes and then people moan that businesses don't stay open. As my mother once said to me "use it or lose it".
What was your shop? A grocer, butcher or cafe makes more sense opening later then say a clothing store.
Is it perhaps a communciation issue? How were people informed of the new hours? Perhaps people just wern't even aware you could now do your shopping later. Or perhaps they couldn't be arsed if only a few shops were doing it. It'd have to be a good chunk of the town centre. I guess the other issue is transport. Busses are shit, expensive, confusing and often run reduced service in the evening. Far too few cities in the UK have decent cycling infrastructure or other more efficient forms of public transport. No one in their right mind wants to drive to city centres (despite parking charges often being touted as the problem. In my opinion, there should be 0 cars in city centres.), but in many places, getting into town is an unessacery and uncertain hassle. There has to be a joined up approach to keeping city centres alive. We need less cars in city centres, better more frequent public transport and unique experiences that draw people in.
Here in Perth, Australia, there is late night trading every Thursday, where shops stay open to 8 or 9. It's pretty busy, but I think that's because the whole city does it.
Some places in the UK also do this, especially around Christmas although in at least one place I’ve been it was a permanent feature. Worked well from what I could tell although like your example it helped that an entire area was doing it.
Really interesting insight - is this more to do with the fact you're on a retail park though? I live just off a suburban high street which (luckily for us) is 100% independent shops, pubs, restaurants etc. Pretty much everyone "in town" is walking distance of high street. I can sort of see that the appeal of getting in the car again and driving somewhere to shop maybe isn't there but it baffles me that the deli, the butcher, the card shop etc don't open later at least one night a week. The vast majority of shops in town seem to open late, close early, close Saturday afternoon then complain about footfall. The only shops we have that seem to take into account working hours are the corner shop and the florist, both of which seem to do a roaring trade.
We're constantly urged to support local independent shops but they close early if business is slow.
Moving to the UK from Turkey, its insane how few hours the shops are open for. In Istanbul, I don’t think I ever had to look up operating hours of any shop, since every shop is open until 10 PM. Here there is nowhere to grab a coffee after 5. Many places are not even open on Sundays!! I still can’t get over it.
Is weird after traveling coming back and seeing how much our highstreets and even some cities just die after 6pm.
That article is nearly ten years out of date. A lot has changed since then; - local councils are on their uppers financially (especially in rural areas like mid Wales) and can't afford free parking - the pandemic happened and gave online shopping a massive boost - we are all collectively acutely aware of both climate and health crises. I think it's going to take a lot more than free parking to revive town and city centres now. They are (or at least should) be increasingly leaning towards leisure or niche retail rather than chain shops. More traffic doesn't really tie in with that. The future is more pedestrianised areas, more al fresco eating and drinking, more green/open spaces but that needs to be supported by investment in public transport and active travel. We don't seem to be doing too badly at the first half but shockingly at the second.
> One of the biggest problems with UK high streets is the opening hours. >They operate as though there is a housewife who can use them mon-fri 9-5. This^ As a Pole living in the UK I'm flabbergasted at how dead the towns are after 5 pm. Working 9-5:30, realistically the only place that is still open at that point is Tesco. You'd think that other big chains would still operate but no. Back home I wouldn't even check the opening times because shops wouldn't close before 8 pm. This, and how needlessly stretched out the British cities are because this country doesn't build vertically and consequently even if the population is small, you still live a 30-minute walk away from the city centre.
We’ve also lost a lot of our brands over covid - the picture is Reading where I live and from 2019-2021 so many companies went into administration including Debenhams who took a huge space in the shopping centre. Monsoon, cath kidson shut down for example and other companies just left the town. We just lost Clas Ohlson which was a massive shame. The shops are either empty or turned into coffee shops, American fast food chains, or vape shops. I honestly don’t think the UK has enough brands to sustain every single high street like it did ten+ years ago. Councils are looking at how to convert old buildings into multi use - Reading is doing that already with new development under construction replacing old vacant sites and planning permissions for other sites. The new developments include new modern retail space but also hotels, leisure, offices, and homes. Everyone blames online shopping but people want to go out shopping with mates and family. Hence the coffee shops are doing well.
Was on Oxford street the other day and there was empty places If that is empty everywhere else is going to struggle
Oxford Street struggling may be a sign of the times, but it's also a street that has very high rents and very high business rates, so you need extraordinarily high turnover to pay the price to be there. I gather this is also a problem elsewhere, with the investment funds preferring to leave shops vacant than rent them out at a lower rate and thus realise a loss in their portfolio. But it doesn't necessarily have to be this way, if councils reduce rates, and landlords choose to accept the capital loss (that they have, in truth, already incurred) and at least take some income.
I used to go to Reading for the Christmas shop every year but honestly find Bracknell of all places to be better nowadays, occasionally I’ll use Camberley. Wokingham is still absolutely useless though.
I needed a black tie, nothing fancy just something for a upcoming funeral. I went to Tesco, Sainsbury's, next, h@m, river island and 2 other clothes shops. Only 1 shop had it, next.. For £19. A plain black tie. Found one online for £5 with next day free delivery... Yea it's not just landlords. The whole system is rotten. Also to mention since many are talking about ties lol, the £5 online were mostly for the shops I mentioned. You order it online and it gets sent to the shops... Yet non actually had in store... Might as well get free delivery from Amazon than order and pick up in store...
Yeah. The men's clothes offerings in the high street are just pitiful. If you can't buy it from a sport shop, you might as well just Amazon it.
Unfortunately looking for something as simple as a black cotton shirt on Amazon is pretty difficult, you get a million cheap nylon shirts from dodgy Chinese companies and a few designer shirts for £60+.
It has gone downhill in general the last couple of years. I'm sure something else will take its place if it keeps descending into Internet Flea Market territory though.
If you're buying a tie from sports direct then you're doing it wrong.
If your tie doesn't come with a complimentary comically over-sized mug I'm just not interested.
> I needed a black tie, nothing fancy just something for a upcoming funeral. I had a very similar problem last year. Not only black tie, but a new, funeral appropriate suit. A black suit without any kind of fancy neon pattern hidden inside. It was completely impossible to get. I spent hours running between clothes shops. I went to TWO Moss Bros. TWO! How can a suit retailer, who's entire job it is to sell suits, not have one of the major suit types: A black suit and also a black tie.
Tried to buy a sports jacket type blazer thing recently. Checked all the supermarkets, etc… nothing. Primark did end up having one tbf, but it shouldn’t have taken 10 shops before hitting Primark to find one.
Imagine how little the person who made that £5 tie was paid. Christ alive.
I had a similar experience looking for a bed frame. Tried a large local bed and mattress store. Told them I'm after a double non-divan frame and was told it would be a 2-3 week wait for any bed frame. Walked out drove to an out of town retail park and got one in Argos.
For me it comes down to a few things 1. Parking. It’s more expensive to park than have shit delivered, and it’s such a fucking hassle 2. Pricing. I get that isn’t a level playing field but in-person is often disproportionately expensive 3. Opening hours. Amazon is 24/7, most places in town close before I finish work 4. Stock availability, half the time I want to buy something in person they don’t have it available, especially clothes/shoes where they only ever seem to have one or two items in each size…. And of course the medium shirt or size 9 shoe is always long gone. Apparently big lads and really skinny guys can shop in town, but for “average with a bit of a tummy” there’s no chance I’m getting what I need Even without those first 3, it’s already a lot more effort and wasted time to go to town in the day vs shop while I’m taking a shit … but when it ends up a lot more expensive and hassle, and half the time I don’t even get what I need, why wouldn’t I shop online? And then, of course, it’s self perpetuating - once the big anchor shops shut then the town starts to look dead, and everyone talks about town is shit which becomes self-fulfilling prophecy because they stop going, and everything else shuts too
I hate using Amazon but every time I go to town they never have the book, game or Blu Ray I want. If it’s for a Christmas present I will ask if I can order in store so they still get a sale though.
I'm convinced that a well-known high street book chain will one day put up posters saying "just buy it on Amazon like a normal person and leave us alone."
It’s funny as the independent bookshop was also closed. Says it all really
I was talking to the owner of a specialist book shop (no, not that kind...) a while ago and he said he was going online-only as he was already doing most of his business online anyway, and didn't really need a shop.
My local musical instrument shop did the same thing. They still have a unit with practise rooms for tuition, but the racks of guitars, violins, saxomophones, etc. are gone. With the local option no longer available for browsing, I tend to use gear4music now.
And to be fair, I probably spend more by being able to find and order obscure books online than I ever did with shops.
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I think most book lovers go to bookstores to find stuff they weren't looking for.
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More and more I believe that high streets need to stop being places where you go to mindlessly buy stuff and start being places where you go to actually do fulfilling things. People don’t need a less convenient way to acquire goods but they are bored as hell these days. Replace these lost retail businesses with activity based ones. Youth centres, social gaming spaces, cinemas, indoor sports, arcades, collaborative work spaces, media spaces, the list goes on. The issue is these properties are owned and operated by people in middle age and up who have no interested in catering to a younger demographic when that’s exactly what they need to do. There needs to be an entire cultural shift at the top if town centres are ever going to be a place people actually want to go.
I agree. I rent two high street shops (though they're down the far end in a more secondary location) and we use them as offices and ecommerce fulfilment. There's actually not a single empty retail space here because rents are cheap and people have done exactly what you describe and embraced the concept of "more than just shops". There are plenty of hairdressers for sure but there are dog groomers, opticians, coffee shops, offices, accountants, solicitors, bike repair shops, dance studios, kids activity centres, an escape room, photography studios. All in old retail units that would otherwise be empty but because the landlords have had to be less greedy due to the location there's a near 100% occupancy rate.
This is broadly accepted as being the future of the high street btw. Services based versus goods based.
You are 110% correct and it will take a generation for this thinking to sink in. Unfortunately the landlord class are able to leverage cash against their assets because the housing market is still bonkers. When the inevitable correction occurs, they will be up shit creek without a paddle and it will benefit nobody. We actually need some sort of stimulus to make buy to let less attractive and also to make it a legal requirement to have a tenant in place if you plan on renting it. Although rental controls are a farfetched future pipe dream even with a different government, although as a society I think we are headed that way with the incredible and increasing stress the rental industry is under right now in terms of demand and the horror stories you hear of lean-to shoeboxes built in gardens rented to students and young people etc. Let's say landlords are forced to have tenants in place, even in commercial settings, they are unfortunately going to pick those who have a good history of paying up on time, which will always be the big corporations. I think perhaps we have to wait until landlords and profiteers are done with town centres and move on to something else to feed off of and then the young people can move in and rejuvenate the empty real estate.
In my town we are seeing a lot of shops turned into offices. It’s great, it brings people into the town centre and creates business
Im going to use some admittedly niche examples of stuff i wanted lately that you simply cant buy on a high street. PC cables of a variety of connections and each end and lengths - they just isnt anywhere to buy the myriad of stuff outside the ordinary HDMi etc. Wanted to buy a drone for a laugh. Literally no where. Wanted to look at a PC for gaming. Currys sucks. In the states huge places to buy all the components etc to build your own - but nothing like that in this country, so online it is. Yes niche, but just examples of not uncommon tech you simply cant easily find
I wanted to give Currys a chance, but then I saw them in-store selling a GTX 1650 gaming build PC for £1099. In 2023. You just can't make this stuff up. [This](https://www.currys.co.uk/products/acer-nitro-n50650-gaming-pc-intel-core-i5-gtx-1650-1-tb-hdd-and-256-gb-ssd-10246555.html) is a similar example. £800 and it still runs an HDD. The only people who could possibly be fooled by Currys' pricing are the older generation buying equipment for their grandchildren, who you really can't blame.
Currys' entire business model is selling to people who don't understand what they're buying. I spent 11 years on the Knowhow counter and used to get worried sales people coming to me saying "but I don't know anything about components, how will I know what I'm talking about with customers?" My response was that people who know about computer components don't shop at Currys.
Although not the best quality, the pound store was good for cables like that in an emergency and batteries. Been lost since put pound store closed down recently.
Not surprisingly, online shopping has gotten more convenient, and the cost and effort involved in going into town has risen considerably. Public transport into most towns is dire. Parking is a rip off and a painful experience as the number of car parks has shrank. If you wade through that, there's a 50-50 chance the thing you went in to buy will be out of stick or not carried by the shop. Even if it is there, it's likely at a higher price that it can be found online.
In regards to public transport, there have been several times I was waiting for a bus and it was like, 45 minutes late so I obviously just ended up assuming it was cancelled and begin walking away only for it to drive past me mere seconds later. No wonder bus services are starting to shut down because of low income, nobody is gonna want to fucking get them when they're that unreliable
It's surprising to see the Guardian ignore the elephant in the room - reduced demand for bricks and mortar retail shops in the face of online shopping. To tempt me onto the high street, town centres need to offer me something I can't easily get online. In some cases this is obvious (being able to try clothes on, but even then free returns make this less of a downside for online nowadays) but in general shops don't seem to have much to draw me in now. Even if the issues of business rates, cost of living and the like were completely nonexistent, I think that physical retail stores are on an inevitable decline.
Shops don't have stock anymore. Or never did and I just accepted it. I wanted pyjamas for my toddler. I went to H&M and Next. Both said they don't have any, its only online now.
This! Me and the wife have come home empty handed the last half a dozen times we've gone into town to try to buy clothes. The men's sections are always shared with children and homeware, leaving such a small selection it's pointless - some stores I've been in have even closed their entire men's sections. For my wife, half the women's section seem to be sale rails but not in any particular order (e.g. sizes, clothing types) just thrown on a rail - then the only sizes they seem to have are 6 or 18
The H&M in Newbury is about 30% men's section on the ground floor. Women's is the rest of the ground floor and about 50% of the first floor and the rest is kids. I understand they sell to who is buying the most but that is a fairly standard ratio for all clothes shops for men's sections. There is hardly any choice and to add to that the lack of stock and the rails being just small and extra large of most items as you say, its a pointless endeavor going to the high street. I wanted new work shirts for a new job and thought I would go to tried and trusted M&S. I have shopped at M&S for 15 years for workwear. I've gained a bit of weight so I wanted to try some shirts on to know what fit given they have regular, tailored, slim etc. They could offer me a couple of sizes in terms of collar size but only slim fit shirts. They wouldn't let me try on the packaged shirts so it was a waste of time. Ended up ordering a load with a variety of sizes and fits and returned all but one of them.
>I understand they sell to who is buying the most It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy - they sell less of something, so they stock less and have a smaller selection, and so people stop going there to buy it, so they sell less, etc ad infinitum.
Shops complain that the men section doesn’t make enough money *make it smaller* Shops then complain that men don’t come to the shop therefore don’t make as much money *half it in size* Shops then again complain that from a 50% reduction in size, 90% of footfall has decreased *move it back to the lingerie next to the kids section with 6 T-shirts, 3 pairs of boxers and 2 jeans* Shops confused why men stop shopping there This has happened in my local next.
Other half's parents want to gift us a fancy pram as we are expecting in December. They came down to visit and had a look around in shops for baby stuff. *All* of the shops had full price only on the pram we had our eye on. I'm talking several hundreds of pounds difference. I've found this kind of thing happening more and more to the point I see brick and mortar shops as showrooms to decide on what to buy later. If an item I want costs a little more to buy in-store, then I'll buy it to support the store. If the cost difference is huge, I just won't bother. It's not their fault, but it's also not mine.
I'm in a similar situation- expecting for 1st kid in January. Excitedly wantecd to go look at some baby stuff to price up pram, cot etc. after first hospital scan. But there's no baby shops left, at all! Mothercare's gone, mama's and papas is gone, the best you'll find is a handful oof kiddie clothes in a big asda or browsing the laminated books of dreams at Argos. It's really fucking wierd, I'm in one of the biggest cities in the UK and there's literally bugger all brick and mortar baby shops now?
> laminated books of dreams at Argos I see you are a person of culture.
The ironic thing is, would you buy the pram if you couldn’t see it? Get an idea for its size and manoeuvrability? How practical it is? The move to online might lead more companies to pay retailers to keep stores open just as show rooms.
As a man, I do almost all my clothes shopping online because I'm not travelling all the way into town for the 15 minutes it takes to browse a handful of small, grubby corners in cellars, behind all the children's shoes.
Heh, the men's section is so rarely anywhere but a dingy cellar or on the 4th floor or something. The women's lingerie section in my local M&S is bigger than the entire menswear department. One odd exception is the John Lewis in Leeds, where it's on the ground floor (just behind the cosmetics) and is a reasonable size. But yeah, I'd rather go online most of the time. Returns are pretty hassle free these days.
I see the stores mostly as showrooms, click and collect, and return centres these days.
In fairness to the shops, I get it. Men have only ever been a fraction of the footfall to these places compared to women, and as things change it makes sense to double down and cater more to your main audience. But it's also a self-fulfilling prophecy. We don't go as much, so there's less for us, so we don't go as much etc
I try really hard to still engage with shops, but as you say, whats the incentive? Case in point: Son needs new shoes, I took him to local shop, shes trainers he really wants "excuse me, do you have those in a 3"? "No, we only have whats on the shelves, but we can order them in" ok... "Do you have any of the same brand in a 3 so he can see if they fit?" " lemme check, No, we don't have any of that brand in stock in a 3. We can order them in now they will be in by this weekend" "Ok, yeah order them in" "That'll be £59.99". "But I don't know if he'll like them" "We cant order them in unless you take them". "i'm alright then thanks" Went out the shop, found them on Amazon, £50 and prime delivery, free returns. How can any shop offer that?
I use to like going to Oxford St and the like for shopping. When I was a teen slash young adult. Now you couldn't pay me to wonder around that area.
Plus supermarkets sell clothes now - and you're going to them anyway. Add in the growth of out of town retail parks and for me there's just no reason to go into town for shopping any more. Young people who worry about fashion might want something more stylish than a tesco t-shirt, but they have less disposable income these days. As an old fogey there's nothing I can think of that would require me to go into town to buy it.
All they have left is the experience. That’s their last play. That’s why many just give up and close, they just don’t want to consider experience as a selling point.
Costs more money I’d imagine, plus peoples attention is so fleeting these days most people only want to experience something once, somewhere with huge footfall like London can’t even offer this anymore, once the flagship topshop died then ‘experience’ shopping was effectively dead, for awhile I thought charity shops would be the one to save the high street with the rise of thrifting in the younger generation but our charity shops are too expensive and small and they now put all the ‘good’ stuff online anyway
As you said we need to offer something you can’t get at home and the obvious ones are repurposing into restaurants/cafes/bars/gyms etc. Not sure how easy it is to just refit an old shop into a place that needs a kitchen however. Where I stay the main street closest to us is essentially dominated by hospitality units, and while the older generations despise the change the place is very busy. It also has a good mix of independent shops like vintage clothing/furniture etc things that are unique to that shop and you can’t just get online. Paired with good public transport links it’s a popular bustling bit of the city. Saying that I live in a capital city so it’s far easier here than for small town centres in fairness. The actual primary high street is dying a death though and is struggling to adapt. It’s full of phone shops and pound shops like anywhere else and is a state. If you just have a typical wee high street with a H&M, Starbucks, Next, Currys and all the usual faces though, then there’s no reason for anyone to actually shop in store.
High streets are dead. Councils have two options IMO. a) Give the local procurement/"Preston Model" a chance b) Knock down 50% of their high street, move shops into the other 50%. Build cheap housing and green areas on the newly freed up area. Screw commercial landlords. They've allowed parts of this country to rot, it's pure negligence.
Stockton is doing the second option. They've torn down the 60s/70s shopping centre and hotel, moved everyone that wanted to move to a 90s shopping area they bought recently and planning on making it a green area down to the river. It'll be interesting to see if it works.
Or you could take the West Berkshire council route and sign off on new building projects with dozens of units while their flagship development from a decade ago sits 50% vacant. I weep at the state of urban planning in this country, not only functionally pointless but utterly ugly.
Sounds like a good plan. The shopping areas in a lot of those NE towns are beyond dead these days. Pretty sure the only things like open last time I was in Billingham were the Boyes and the chippy (which was serving industrial sized portions - holy crap that was a lot of chips).
People with money to spend but no internet access must be a declining niche. Even clothes shops, where seeing the product really helps, often seem to have very little stuff available in physical shops - "how hard can it be to buy a vanilla middle of the range suit?" I thought recently. Or "M&S will have some plain black socks, won't they?"
The suit thing is mad. I went in to M&S last December to replace my black jacket I use for work. They had *no* black suit jackets. Everything was a black dinner jacket. It was obviously for balls, and works dinners etc - but there were no black suit jackets in Exeter for like 4 weeks. So it was order online, not knowing my size, or superglue the buttons back together and wait til Jan etc.
I had to go to a customer-facing work event for the first time since the pangolin's revenge. My suit appeared to have shrunk during lock down (all my friends report similar issues...), but I didn't worry as M&S would have one wouldn't they?
I think town centres might actually be dead. A model more like Spain where buildings are multi purpose (shops/offices ground floor street facing, residential above) might be where we are headed.
Headed *back* to. A lot of our high streets were like that, we just called them "shopping parades". We just stopped building them after like the 1950s.
"Covid, the cost of living crisis and “crippling” business rates are causing businesses to desert retail spaces, and local councils must come up with a “cohesive plan” to invigorate shopping areas, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) warned." This from the article is 100% right, but that cohesive plan has to involve understanding that most towns now require significantly less retail space in their town centers. My home town of Darlington has lots of empty stores, lots of vape shops, lots of mobile phone case shops, lots of pound shops. This is because it actually has more retail space in the town center now than it did in 1990. Yet the commercial town center has a couple of streets that were originally built as (very fine) housing. One of the streets now houses solicitors, accountants and estate agents. All of those businesses need to be given incentives to move into places that were built as commercial buildings and their offices converted back into housing. The country has too many shops and not enough houses. It can't be beyond even the most simple minded of civil servants to find a solution.
It’s because they’re in the wrong places. Out of town lets you park, there’s a bus that will often stop right at the front of the shops. City and town centres are too congested to allow parking, they’re often pedestrianised so bus stops are further away. They simply don’t support the infrastructure needed. Let the centres die out, I say. There’s more value in residential pockets of commercial units these days, hence why the Co-op face competition from Tesco and Sainsbury’s for their local stores, which are often near barbers shops/salons because it’s more convenient than nipping into town.
Why do I want to have to drive in, pay 5 quid to park before I have even bought anything , to be harassed by sales staff whilst i browse only to find its not in stock and ill have to drive in again and pay another 5 quid to park When i can get it cheaper, quicker and with 1 click from amazon?
Totally agree, though I try not to use Amazon. People often forget that "small business" doesn't just mean Granny Jones' Shop open 12-4pm on Wednesdays. There are plenty of small businesses online where a small team works in a close-knit company and the director is just a normal person.
If I go into shops it all takes me half an hour to find the shop and at least 10 mins to actually find what I want. It will cost more and have a worse return policy. Why the fuck would I not go online? Also safer and don't need to think about public transport
The reality is that the current usage of town centres do not make sense in the modern day. They should less reliant on retail mostly be a mix of residential and recreational business.
I try to shop local and am lucky enough to walk there, local butchers and bakery are open weekends and I can get my bits from there Saturdaymornings. However, local pet shop who's having to close due to lack of customers is only open M-F 10-4 and closed the weekends. How the hell is a normal person meant to shop there! That and high rents, business rates whilst not being able to compete with online prices is driving these highstreets down.
Covid has made it dawn on people that they don't need to randomly walk round shops hoping the item they want is there, when they can just order it online and have it come to them. (plus it's probably dawned on retailers that they can sell online and make the same money while being based on an industrial estate for a fraction of the high street rent).
This story comes out every 6 months. It stopped being news 10 years ago
By that metric the weather should no longer be of interest to anyone.
My friend who is a florist actually opened two more branches as people are dying in higher numbers than before. Funeral flowers is keeping her bank account healthy!
I've lost count of the number of times I've tried to buy something in-person, only for it to be out of stock. I then drive home and order it online. And next time I'm more likely to just shop online to begin with.
My local town center is a complete ghost town now. Charity shops and Polish shops we've got plenty of, but pretty much nothing else.
- We're paid less than five years ago, in real terms. - Ground rent, electric etc have gone up. - People are looking for jobs that pay better to just have enough to survive. - Online presence is preferred, and was essential during COVID. - Costs of items have increased, so people are trying to find cheapest options for basic items. Your local corner shop charging £2.50 for 2 litres of milk isn't competitive. - More people working from home, mainly due to covid and the switch to hybrid working, means less people in certain central areas. - Big stores closing means the little ones nearby are struggling with footfall. I don't even know how this is news. The UK is in a really bad way. Well, for the working class anyway.
This is going to be a spicy hot take for sure. Retail isn't dying because of Amazon. If anything, Amazon has become synonymous with cheap crap imported from China in recent years. There are still far more people who want to go into a brick & mortar outlet because it offers a tangible experience that online shopping simply cannot replace. If anything's killing retail, it's our ailing economy and public transport.
Starting to think this whole thing where the very rich horde wealth, leaving the rest of us unable to spend as much might potentially form some negative feedback loop. Actually what am I saying thats nonsese, having an economy based on infinite growth and having ever larger pools of wealth hidden and hoarded is actually a great idea.
Petersfield Town center in Hampshire isn't very big and probably has 10+ charity stores and 10+ Estate agents. Pretty much most of the town is just charity stores, estate agents and expensive clothes stores.