To think this is why the high street is failing?

@IdLikeToBeAFraser I wonder if they racially profile?

A long time ago, when I was living in a part of London that was still in the process of slowly being "gentrified" we had a bunch of small independnet shops - corner shop type places mostly, a few restaurants/pizza etc. What was fascinating is that when one of those Sainsbury Locals opened up, the small shops were totally polarised in how they felt about it. The corner shop type places were obviously very upset - they were losing business hand over fist. But the little deli, the piza place etc, were THRILLED because they actually got MORE business - people would come from further afield to use the Sainsbury to get their bread and milk, but then would pop in for a takeaway or to pick up some deli items - things hey wouldn't get at the sainsburys. Last time I drove past the area, it was all very buzzy and thriving.

@IdLikeToBeAFraser That is interesting. It explains why some people are checked all the time and others rarely.

there's a lot of AI and profiling involved here. I was NOT surprised to be stopped and rescanned (well, 10 items or whatever) after I'd spent 30 minutes wandering around with my very obviously disabled neice being given responsibility for the scan-as-you-go. I know she's more than capable, but I suspect the cameras/AI noticed her and we were profiled as being high risk. I have no idea what other things flag for the scanners - from contents of the trolley to personas - but I suspect it's a lot. Over time, this profiling will hopefully become better and more effective and therefore everyone would genuinely only be scanned randomly once in a blue moon.

I agree the old style independent corner shops are not as good as branded corner shops, they could not compete.
We had a city centre supermarket that was a decent size that closed as the owners of the leased land wanted to sell it to make more money. Lots of people bemoaned the closure because we have a lot of people living in apartments that want a wider choice than the smaller shops can offer.

I used the scan and shop thing once, and got checked. Had to unpack everything that I'd so carefully packed along the way. It put me off doing it again.

Yes, exactly. And sorry, to be clear, when I said "mini waitrose" I'm talking about anything from the very small one at a service station to the smallish ones you sometimes see in shopping centres or on smaller town high streets - so have all the stuff, but the actual store is much smaller than the big ones. The old style independent corner shops are, frankly, not that popular because no one really wanted to buy fresh meat and veg from them and that's what you're doing now - you want high quality produce at a convenient location.

But this is my point - in the town centre, you don't need a massive store with everything. People in town doing phusical food shopping are probably picking up specific things - fresh items they want to check themselves or fancy items for a dinner party or last minute bits because they ran out of bread and milk and dinner for the toddler.

Absolutely this! I already work 45 hours a week. I don't then want to go and do a Big Shop and have to scan it all myself on a self service till - that's what the supermarket staff are there to do. Obviously it's not the fault of the staff on the floor that they are understaffed - but it's certainly not mine.

See if there wasn't a minimum £amount for online shopping, I'd probably do two a week rather than one. I pop into the little M&S down the road midweek to pick up bread, milk and maybe some of their nice chicken for an easy dinner. Might get a pack of biscuits while I'm there.

I nip to the Morrisons cos my DD has bad reactions to Pampers nappies/pants so I use their own brand but I don't like Morrisons for a big shop so don't do theirs online.

But if I could just set up a weekly "replenishment" shop, without high delivery fees etc, for a few bits, I would.

Our local suburbia high street si doing fine. But rents are not that high so we have independents. It is still busy. The City Centre has gone to shit.

Dunno, I went to our city centre the other day and it was heaving, admittedly it's summer holidays, but trying to park after 10am is almost impossible and shops were jam packed. I couldn't wait to escape!
But having recently had some problems with online orders, I wanted actual physical shops.
Services in this country are all a bit shit at the moment. I think covid really did speed up the downward trajectory!

Glad to hear it. There are people all over the internet saying they get checked every 3 or 4 times they scan.

Nadeed i think ive been checked once in 4 years. I prefer self scan and choose to use it even when there are plenty of manned checkouts.

I agree that exorbitant rents in town centres are a huge part of the problem. A modest shop in ours can be upwards of 50,000 pa to lease before you've even turned the lights on, never mind factoring in stock costs and staff. But this is the problem of the property market in general.

Alot of our town centre is owned by big London companies and overseas investors who snapped it up when prices were lower. The properties are assets and part of a portfolio. They attract tax breaks, and it's immaterial to the owners whether they're occupied or not - there is no incentive to lower rents, and no obligation to consider the impact of boarded up premises on the landscape nor the community. Councils are pretty limited and often toothless, and trying to mop up the fallout from loss of revenue while often apparently reporting imminent bankruptcy themselves.

I dunno what the answer is for bigger town centres, but it's good to hear about the village high street mentioned above.

Perhaps it's all the result of excessive central urbanisation? I dunno, it's just so sad to see my once beautiful town decaying before my eyes, with stabbings, rapes and other incidents reported daily in the local rag, which is putting people off going at all.....

Lots of people on MN say they had not taken anything and still got the whole lot rescanned.
I don't even want to get stopped for a sample number of items. If I did self scanning I want to leave when I have paid. Not going through the checkouts really does not save that much time if you go to a supermarket that has enough cashiers.

I disagree about mini Waitroses etc. They have replaced the older style independent corner shops. And new supermarkets are opening in my City. None have closed, not one. I suspect a lot of people do what I do. Order bulky items online that I really do not need to check the quality of e.g. toilet paper, drinks. And get meat and fresh fruit and veg in person.

Nadeed · Today 16:49
But with scanners you can get stopped while a staff member takes ages to check your whole shop.

This has never happened to me. Usually if they check you, they sample a small number of items in your shop. You only have to have the whole shop rescanned if you have not scanned everything you've taken.

Just to add to my essay above, I think urban planners these days really need to be thinking much more holistically. I suspect they are catching up and probably newer training course are more aware of this. eg how to integrate technology to make things work better and more effectively. Using AI to hlep figure out better pricing for landlords and town centre rents - I can easily see this becoming a more dynamic process. More research by towns on what is needed locally and how to improve the infrastructure accordingly - eg I think there's a lot of people who want to be abe to drive, but towns have to get smarter about avoiding congestion so that people can enjoy the town centre without all the cars. Attracting the kind of stores that also attract footfall.

Part of the problem is that many of these changes are massive and require extensive investment - changing road systems for example.

OP I completely share your frustration. Since the the dark days of covid, customer service has gone out of the window, to be replaced by everything being for the convenience of the shopkeepers. This might take the form of either self-scan tills or workers cashing up way before closing time, or being treated rudely by shop staff who act like they don't want to be at work.
I'm so fed up with the state of high street shopping now that, apart from groceries, I buy almost everything else online.
The customer is no longer King (or Queen) 😞

The issues of high streets are a lot more complex than most people on this thread are discussing. As a few posters have pointed out - a lot of the things we're seeing now are symptoms of the bigger changes but the problem is that our high streets haven't adapted for this sufficiently.

So online has lots of advantages - variety and choice being a key one, as well as convenience. This means that in store shopping needs to meet a very specific purpose. I suspect this is partly why we're seeing new shopping districts prioritising higher end or specialist retail - look at Battersea Power Station for example.

Town centres also haven't figured out the shift so rents are still exorbitant, often based on high levels of footfall and physically large stores. But again, that's simply not practical. Let's take me shopping for DS 13 - most of what he wears is cheap and cheerful t-shirts and trackies, which we can buy online anywhere. When there's a bit more cash on offer, he likes a Nike t-shirt or similar. Most of this I can do online as well. The things we do in person are, for example, when for his birthday he wants a "proper" Nike trackie - those are harder to assess and check for sizing online, and they're expensive. So we go into our locak JD Sport or similar. I don't think it's a co-incidence that these stores have loads of shoes, loads of trackies and a fair number of t-shirts, but not the variety that they offer online - the stuff people are happy to buy online, stay online. This allows the in-person store to be smaller and more compact, with lower rents. Our local shopping mall has two massive empty spaces - I suspect because they can't find anyone to replace the department store and the large H&M that used to use those spaces. If they split it into multiple spaces, perhaps they'd have more luck?

Then food. Again, many of us do our big shops online. So why do we use in-person stores? For some it's because they don't like online - often older or with some mobility issues or because it's not practical for them with their lifestyles. These people are therefore more likely to find doing their shopping at a big superstore, outside of town, a bit easier - parking in disabled spaces near to the door, plenty of choice, options for mobility etc. For others, instore is because they have specific needs and preferences in terms of food types/quality and for others it's about speed - even Amazon Fresh can't always deliver on the day. I don't think it's surprising therefore that the smaller supermarkets are often popular and even less so that we're seeing a proliferation of Waitrose and M&S in these sort of situations because people ewant to whip in and grab some nibbles and a pizza vs going in to bulk buy Persil - almost every one of our local garages now has either a mini Waitrose or a mini M&S. A few have a Tesco or a generic brand, but it's fewer and fewer all the time because it's the Waitrose and M&S that people want when they're doing mini-shops.

Then there's transport. As people have said - we don't live in our town centres, and too often public transport isn't reliable or sufficient but parking is expensive. And then once these shoppers do arrive, it's often spread out and/or congested and unpleasant to navigate. Again, town centres have to accept that things are changing - if people ARE coming into town, they want it to be a useful and pleasant experience. Towns have to get this right if they want to see changes.

So, in brief, my point is that the way we want to use high streets is changing and the shops/high streets have to change with us, and that's simply not happening fast enough.

There's a village high street where our children do their extra curricular activities that is absolutely BOOMING. They've completely nailed so many of these issues. All the stores are physically small which I assume keeps rents down. They have a mix of independent and chains providing things that people WANT to buy in person and want to browse in OR that are more convenient in a quick in-person trip. A huge variety of cafes and restaurants so everyone is catered to. The high street itself is easy to navigate with wide pavements and few roads to cross, and where you do need to cross, there are plenty of options. There is a butcher and a greengrocer which are expensive, but they can get away with it because foot traffic is huge so they get a lot of people who are willing to pay, and the ones that aren't, go to one of the supermarkets (that are not overwhelmingly large). Parking is accessible and not over the top expensive. Its becoming so popular that more and more I hear of people driving there from neighbouring villages and not just because they're in the area for some other purpose or live locally. The locals are starting to complain!

I haven't been to a normal high street chain shop in over 20 years, the moment the customer service failed I went elsewhere. I will happily pay the earth for customer service. If I go into curry's I don't want to know more than the so called sales assistant. So I don't go there now. I go to the small shops (which are usually part of euronics franchise) because they care about the customer. Normally it's a few quid in it, and I happily pay. There are many small shops which closed because of the high street. Now I believe we are entering a reverse cycle. High street rent is astronomical, little small shops can sell at the same price because their overheads are less.
The oment shops think they ca do without customer service, why would I go to them.
Most things I can buy either direct from the manufacturer or cheaper over the internet. If there is no value being added by the chains, I don't see why I should use them.
When I worked (school holidays / student part time work) in retail, I would literally walk out at the end of my shift. If tills weren't cashed up because they paid us until the time the store closed, then tough. I was told it was expected that I turn up half an hour before my shift starts. I just pointed them to their contract with me, and said, Nope I'm not. You can always decide to dismiss me for working to my contract on minimum wage. Luckily I then worked for RichardSounds in my final year in Reading. Fantastic respect to the employees (part and full time) they had the concept of give and take and discounts for all staff. I happily stayed late and sometimes opened up for them because they respected their employees.

Oh, and the bandying about of the term Luddite - actually they weren't opposed to progress in general, they were fighting for the right to make a living because industrialisation was putting people out of work and there was feck all help for them to adjust, it being the good old days of work or starve.

Ultimately if the job market becomes smaller and smaller as the human input isn't needed, what are we going to do to prevent mass homelessness and unemployment? If everyone pretty much retains in tech, and only a few manual roles exist, what happens? I smell UBI and population reduction by stealth.

@Nadeed that sounds like a great idea!

Retail shopping has went way down, but companies never look at why people are buying less.