To think parking charges are killing the high street?

[menztoray]

Lots more people are shopping online now including myself. But if you do want to shop in traditional high streets, parking charges are often fairly high. I think this stops people shopping in high streets, especially if they just want to buy a few low value things. I understand that local councils need to make money, but I do think this is contributing to killing the high street.

the councils are killing the shops with charges, and the shops are killing themselves with poor service and poor stock

Nail on the head.

It’s not so much the cost for me it’s knowing how long I will be and having the correct change
If I’ve only got enough change for a 2 hour pay and display ticket I’m going to be constantly checking the time but if I go to an out of town shopping centre it’s free and I can take as long as I want

so you can't blame rates for the absence of the smallest shops.

But it's all connected isn't it? If there's only 3-4 decent shops in town lots of people won't bother, because it's not worth paying the parking charges to just visit three places, particularly when those places aren't very well known to most people.

Go into Clarks and they never have the sizes/styles I ask for - always the same answer - go home and order online for in-store collection. Same with M&S etc. If anything, if they really want their shops to survive they should have a lot more stock in store (like they always used to) and even better, how about they do some "store only" stock lines to drive people back to their shops?

The problem is cyberspace is infinite, but a shop on a high street can only hold so much. Which inevitably leads to high-turnover or high-margin products with anything else losing out. Which leads to a vicious spiral, as few shops chase fewer customers with less stock and choice.

There are also some .... interesting stocking decisions. Last time I went into Clarks (probably 2008 when DS was starting college) I chose a pair of shoes and (this is what age and experience bring) asked for a spare pair of laces at the till. Apparently Clarks didn't sell the laces for the shoes they sell. Which in this case lost them the sale, and then the customer. Now buying shoes online, I'm freed from the tyranny of fashion, and can actually get what I want.

Surprisingly (!), that's probably because the councils put signage up for their paid-for car parks, but don't publicise the free ones or free on street parking. It's fine if you know the town, but for outsiders, they'll just go where the signs direct them.

en.parkopedia.com/ ?

But most small independents would be exempt from business rates due to the small business rate relief,

Suppose you are selling custom wotsits.

If you have a high street shop in Sometown, you can a custom wotsit to everyone in Sometown who wants one, if they can be bothered to come into town. You might pick up some passing trade, but you're selling custom wotsits which are a hundred quid and require a second visit to collect.

And then you go out of business.

If you have a web presence, you can sell custom wotsits to the world wide wotsit community, without the cost of keeping a shop or paying someone to staff it. You have to advertise, but you had to advertise anyway. If you advertise locally, you have the same customers for less cost. If you advertise more widely, more customers.

Unless they are local wotsits for local people, how can you lose?

Councils, and proponents of the "high street" think there is a large, and growing market consisting of people who want to buy new things they haven't bought before, have the money to buy new things they haven't bought before, and won't shop online. These people do not exist. They might have existed twenty years ago (people in their fifties, born about 1945, nervous about the new online trade, but still in work and still interested in new thing), but now there are:

(a) One or more of older, less well off, less well educated people who won't shop online, but also don't have a lot of money and are conservative in their tastes

(b) One or more of younger, better off, more educated people who are perfectly happy to shop online, have some money and are interested in new things.

There is no significantly sized (c), of people with the money to spend in small independent shops, the time to go to them, the inclination to shop in them, and something stopping them from doing it online.

Those are the facts. People might not like them, but they are the facts. What we do with them is a separate problem, but pretending it's all a bad dream and we are all going to wake up in five years' time in "Janet and John go High Street Shopping in 1958" is not a business plan.

re: buses ...

inspired by this thread, I decided to remind myself why buses are shit. Assuming I am prepared to take the travelling time hit (90 minutes on an assumed-to-be-running-on-time bus network vs. 20 minutes by car) there's also the rapacity of the operators that won't accept each others tickets. My journey was 2 operators - a return ticket each makes ... £9.00 for a "pop to the shops". That's a lot of parking. Plus the added bonus of being able to put the shopping in the car.

Our local town used to have a handful of free 30 minute spaces in town, 1 hour spaces a bit further out and 2 hour spaces about 10 minutes walk from town.

They've all been replaced by parking meters charging 50p per 20 minutes.

This kind of behaviour has destroyed the market, greengrocers and independent butchers.

YANBU.

London suburb - £7.50 an hour for parking - 4 spaces. Rest is resident permit only from 8:30-6:30pm. High street is slowly dying, loads of shops closing down.

Public transport links are terrible in the suburbs. It's a 40 min walk for me one way to the High street, or 2 buses one way. Realistically I'd chose neither and order off amazon

I agree OP. My nearest town is Altrincham which has been lauded for turning itself around. Partly due to a revitalised market but IMO also because parking was so cheap for a while. However car parking charges are rapidly going up again so I'm not sure if the resurgence will last.

I decided to remind myself why buses are shit.

When the government in London "deregulated" the buses, ie broke them to the point of uselessness, they conveniently didn't do it for London, which retained integrated ticketing, timetabling and so on. Thanks, London: not content with spending a lot of money on your public transport while denying any capital investment elsewhere (see Crossrail: 15 bn to you, nothing to the rest of us, and you've still fucked it up) you also as an act of spite broke all the municipal bus services in the rest of the country because...well, no-one knows, really.

Yes I agree. I' d rather have free delivery than pay for parking in our city centre.

I looked at buses as an academic exercise. As a wheelchair user, DW doesn't feel brave enough to get into it over asking to use a buggy space, so as a couple we drive.

Personally I do walk to our local high street for the exercise, not the shopping.

Agree op

I live between a few towns i can visot.
Out of them, there's one that offers 2hrs free parking and that's where I go. I'd visit the others more but £1.50ish per hour puts me off.
Plus I find new car parks too small with not enough room to manoeuvre comfortably etc.

Definitely. I needed a bulb for my car today, I decided to visit the independent car parts shop in local town, arrived and no space to pull up outside, pay and display carpark next door which would have cost me more than the actual bulb so I left it and went to halfords

YANBU, I’ve long stopped caring about high streets & would rather go to Bluewater, Lakeside or online. Local councils & their greedy parking policies and Sky high rents are as much to blame for the decline in a lot of high streets as the internet

If it was free it would probably all be full all the time unless the town is small. The payment is partly just to stop people parking all day long. The disc system where you get a free disc and can only stay up to 1 or 2 hours can work quite well.

But generally people do need to rely on cars less and be encouraged to walk/cycle into their local towns. It's usually much quicker anyway by the time you've been stuck in traffic/looked for a parking space/paid for it/walked to the shops.

You don't have to drive! Cars are killing the high street, not parking. The best way to get people to use shops again is get people to arrive by foot, cycle or public transport.

You don't have to drive! Cars are killing the high street, not parking. The best way to get people to use shops again is get people to arrive by foot, cycle or public transport.

You know not everyone lives where that's an option, right?

Our town centre is a mix of empty shops, charity shops and phone shops, not much else. The council seems incapable of understanding that a combination of machines that don't give change, don't allow you to pay by phone and ridiculously high charges has totally killed it as a place to shop.

I went to my nearest city today. It has free parking at its park and ride sites and my bus pass gives me free travel from there. Guess where I shop?

I got hit with a parking fine from my nearest big shopping centre. Normally we visit Merry Hill for the shops and free parking. But at Christmas we ‘overstayed’, our fault for not realising they had a maximum stay of only 2 hours, we had done a lot of gift shopping, then went for a meal.

We have no intention of paying the fine, just mightily pissed off because a two hour shopping window is usually enough but to fine us for spending too much time (all time spent spending cash, I might add) just means we will not shop iat Intu Merry Hill because I don’t appreciate being charged an extortionate amount for over staying.

Car park charges drive customers away.

I avoid town due to the difficulty of finding a space and the cost of a space and no plenty of people who say the same.
The high street has lots of issues in competing with online but this is definitely one of them.

I think online shopping and banking are killing the high street, it will be gone soon. Parking costs are the least of your worries if you enjoy shopping in store.

I went Christmas shopping in Brighton the week before Christmas and it was dead. Last few years I have always expected to queue to get in the Churchill centre car park and then drive around for ages to find a space. This year no queue and half the spaces empty. Most shops had already started their sales and people were still not buying. Even primark was empty and it is the firs time ever I haven’t had to wait ages at the tills.
Very few of the things I wanted to buy were available just loads of sale tat so I gave up and ordered 95% of my Christmas shopping online.

I think anyone who believes the "High Street" is going to make a comeback is backing a loser. After all, it's hardly like online retailing is going to suddenly ease off.

I think John Timpson was pretty on the money here:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46630861

Britain has twice as many shops as it needs, according to the author of a report looking at how to revive the nation's High Streets.

Retailer Sir John Timpson said local councils must be given more money to turn town centres into communities and meeting places.

Sir John told the BBC revival should be a "bottom up" job, with councils taking the lead.

"People should be allowed to get on and do it themselves," he said.

Sir John, a member of the founding-family of shoe repair and key-cutting business Timpson, said each town centre needed to establish a task force to address issues such as planning. He said "planning must be made simpler and quicker".Britain has twice as many shops as it needs, according to the author of a report looking at how to revive the nation's High Streets.

(contd)