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Is the High Street doomed

hash tag said:
Most places are expensive when compared to online retailers who pay little or no tax and treat their staff like slaves.
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This is of course true. I meant in the context of similar brick and mortar shops though. I've never had to use mothercare but I know my Mum who was a foster carer thought they were ridiculous.
 
Stephen King wrote a chillingly prescient novel about a whole town, not only a high street, that is doomed.
 
I have been to mother care for years but often used toys r us for baby stuff, like nappies. Whatever happened to them :rolleyes:
 
Like Tottenham Ct Rd - Oxford St is a shadow of what it once was. Apart from Selfridges and a big John Lewis finally getting a makeover, there so many souvenir/tat, american candy stores and other temporary looking luggage type places, all basically non useful shit. Many closures too. BHS, House of Fraser soon leaving, Benetton.

I have the misfortune of working in the area and there's little affordable eating there either. I preferred the days when I could find an affordable greasy spoon, Greggs or a Sainsburys cafe within walking distance of my office. Load of bollocks.
 
BristolEcho said:
This is of course true. I meant in the context of similar brick and mortar shops though. I've never had to use mothercare but I know my Mum who was a foster carer thought they were ridiculous.
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Yup, mothercare have always been horrifically overpriced - I recall looking for everything when my first was one her way and mothercare were between 30 and 50% more expensive than places like toys'rus and the Glasgow Pram Centre.

The one good thing they do is fit baby seats in cars, everything else is just a chiselling rip-off.
 
The costs of stores, (greedy landlords still not realising that their assets will soon be worthless), staff and paying full tax, vs. online shops with cheap warehouses, cheap staff and dodging tax, high streets are fucked and there’s nothing much can be done about that.
 
I think the days of large stores...M&S,BHS etc etc are probably declining if not already gone.....In Northampton BHS and M&S are next to one another so the main shopping street will now have two huge empty properties to add to all the other smaller empty shops lining our town centre....even the retail parks are beginning to look a bit sparse...if Debenhams goes that is a really massive property that will sit empty......there really needs to be some thought as to what will happen to and what can be done with these spaces....greedy landlords indeed will soon have millstones around their necks.....:rolleyes:
 
Heavens. They'll have to let to small traders.

I can see Oxford Street in 10 years being just a shite miasma of tourist tat and coffee chains with Selfridge's holding out.
 
Problem with all these emptying stores in central London is they all too readily get turned into crap souvenir tat shops, or 'american candy' places. blugh.

Remember when the Trocadero had Segaworld, Laserquest, a Multiplex cinema, and all kinds of other cool shit. It truly looked like we were heading to the promised world of cyberpunk hangouts, and techno entertainment, but its just more crap souvenir shops now.
 
Bahnhof Strasse said:
high streets are fucked and there’s nothing much can be done about that.
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Capitalism has brought this on itself. The same people now moaning about being outcompeted by nebulous online companies are the ones who got where they are now by crushing independent businesses in exactly the same way as they are themselves now being crushed, to the point where every high street in Britain is basically the same. And when the chains go belly up according to the merciless logic of the system that created them in the first place, no independent businesses can afford to take their place because they've driven up commercial rents with their high-margin, high-volume business model which somehow never led to a high-wage economy.
 
There are only two shops left in our high street that were there 40 years ago. The Lemon Place fish and chip shop, and Corals bookmakers.
 
I'm not particularly well-travelled but it seems to me that other countries in Europe have not succumbed to homogenisation of retail to nearly the same extent as the UK has. In Italy chain outlets are the exception rather than the rule in towns and cities, even in international shopping destinations like Milan most businesses seem to be independents outside of a few Oxford Street-esque areas. Genoa, a major regional city, has one medium-sized supermarket in the city centre, a handful of little Carrefours and that's about it. People seem to get most of their shopping from the bakery, butcher, greengrocer, deli etc. Simillar story in France, where there are more supermarkets and more out-of-town hypermarchés but they open at the same 'when we feel like it' hours as the local greengrocer rather than all day every day and they still don't seem anywhere near to driving out M. Poisson the fishmonger down the road.

I'm sure there are numerous factors at work here, cultural, political and economic, but I'd be willing to bet our antisocial working hours play a role. People don't have time to wander around getting this here and that there if there's an option to get it all from Tescos and then maybe get home before the kids go to bed.
 
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