To think the High St is doomed

[MissLucyEyelesbarrow]

Just back from Christmas shopping in a medium-sized town. I know small retailers have taken a huge hit this year, so I'm trying to buy everything from a physical store, and not make Jeff Bezos (Amazon) any richer.

Seems like there are lots of other people doing the same, because the streets were already busy at 9, but..none of the small, independent shops were open. It's two Saturdays before Christmas, people haven't been able to shop because of lockdown, the number of customers in a shop at one time is restricted, so shopping is slower, shops only have a few weeks to make some profits after a disastrous year - but apparently not a single small retailer had thought of opening earlier than their usual 10 or 10.30. I'm sure some couldn't because of child care issues or similar, but every single one? Most of these are small stores, staffed by the owners so they can't all have staffing issues.

Of course, all the chains were open at 9 on the dot, so guess where everyone did their shopping? And Jeff Bezos is open for business 24/7.

I worked in retail and catering for 10 years while studying. It's a bloody hard job and I feel for every small business owner this year. But they are pushing customers into the arms of the big retailers. AIBU?

I have shopped small this year without having to go into a shop at all. All my Christmas presents are from small business owners - long as you have a website you can sell. So I think this contributes as well, either maybe these shops also have websites so are now trying to trade online, or online trading itself is putting them out of business?

I'm pleased not to have used Amazon once, and have bought really beautiful things as presents this year. I attended some virtual Christmas markets and it was great (though I really miss real life ones, I went to the Manchester one last year and loved it)

I agree. All very well to say "support local businesses" but they are not charities, people aren't going to support them out of sheer goodwill - they have to actually provide a viable service.
The ones in my area have awkward opening hours - like you say, 10am opening or closing at 4pm, even 3pm on a Saturday, and closed on a Sunday.
I tried to go to a local grocer the other week and it was randomly closed for over an hour at lunchtime (despite already being limited to 9-4 opening hours) as the owner apparently had some errands to do. In that time loads of people came to the door and then had to walk away and go to the nearby Tesco instead.

I know local shops can't compete with 24hr supermarkets but even if they were open, say, 9-6.30 it would help them.
It means people can go in after work, as most households now have 2 adults working full time so doing shopping at 2pm on a Wednesday isn't an option for most.

It is a problem.

The shops by me typically open 10-4. I work 9 -5 so I never go in them.

I think the high street could be reinvented. I’ve never been one for ‘social shopping’ but I’d love the high street to be more of a social and cultural hub, restaurants bars etc but also kids play places, entertainment, attractions, education etc. I don’t see the appeal of a day out shopping, but I’d love that. I know it would take a lot of investment, but a vision for the future post- retail high street.

I have two runs of shops where I live in London.

The shops that have done well - greengrocer, hardware shop, deli and bakery have always had reasonable hours. So they either open before 8 and/or shut at 6pm. Incidentally one of the owners of each retailer is over 60 and in one case looks 90.

The shops that have shut up permanently were never open before Covid and it isn't surprising Covid hit them badly. That includes one cafe we tried to go to many times and simply was not open.

Things change, people change, shopping habits change.

Local shops have to be competitive - relying on people shopping with them purely because they are physically local is no way to run a business.

And at the risk of stating the obvious, they have to be where the customers are. If the customers are online, they have to be online. If the customers are on Amazon, they have to be on Amazon (it is a marketplace after all - lots of businesses make a significant chunk of revenue from Amazon sales).

The only times I try shopping in town they often don't have what I want in stock and they just say try online ... if they used more click and collect it would move more with the times

@CakeRequired

The High Street has been doomed since they started opening retail parks with free parking. Covid just sped up the process.

Should really stop wasting money trying to save it, give up and have the councils focus on other things that are more needed in their area. A bigger hospital and better/more schools would be great in mine.

The High Street was doomed long before retail parks. Chain stores took over High Streets back as far as the 70s/80s and drove out most small/local independents. I remember 20 years ago, people were complaining that all town centres were the same as they all had the same chain stores and few independents. We also had the likes of Asda, Tesco, etc opening large stores on the edge of the High Street. What happened then is that those chain stores left the High Street and moved to retail parks, and now retail parks themselves are in trouble. It's the culmination of 50 years of change in retail. Even without the internet, High Streets were dying at a rapid rate.

@Bookriddle

My local town is very expensive to park in at the weekends! Why would i pay £5 for 2 hours when i can go to a retail complex and park for free and get everything i need!

The high street has been doomed for years, covid has just put another nail in the coffin

It’s the same here. Parking isn’t as much as £5 for two hours but it’s still expensive. They’ve now installed machines where you have to enter your reg, that must have cost ££££ - far more than the odd person passing on a ticket would have done.

The shops here are rubbish too. I can drive 20 minutes to a retail park with far better shops and park for nothing. If our high street dies it completely deserves to, the place is like a ghost town already.

@Badbadbunny

True. People just don't want to accept we are moving forward, like always. Wall-e is starting to look more and more accurate and likely to happen.

Sadly I have to agree with you. Went to our local town centre this week. Three shops had closing down signs, plus another few had already closed. That’s not including Top shop. One end of town looked more viable than the other. Depressing. This is in a town which usually keeps stores when large chains close some of them.

Honestly I have tried everything I can to make my business cost effective and appealing. We have the BID who are only interested in levy payers and as we fallunder the rates threshold we are excluded from their initiatives, despite putting alot of effort into community projects
I work for a BID and i dont think that's necessarily so, at least not our BID.

My local town is very expensive to park in at the weekends! Why would i pay £5 for 2 hours when i can go to a retail complex and park for free and get everything i need!

Christ, this is depressing to read. Shopping in a local town with independent stores is a very different experience to shopping in a retail park. The cost of parking doesn’t feature in my decision making, but clearly it is a big deal for some people. Don’t jump in with ‘but £5 is a lot of money for some people!’ please. Of course it is, but they aren’t the same people going to retail parks to buy lots of stuff.

I was interested to read what @MistressoftheDarkSide had to say. I think that if we want to keep retail in town centres - which, let’s face it is good for everybody; who wants to live somewhere with no shops and no local colour? - fundamental changes to business rates and leases are needed.

I don’t work in retail, but I do work in finance. When I’m looking at leases as part of my day job, I am regularly astonished by the depth and cost of the commitment. Who’s going to take a chance on a physical retail business when you are carrying an obligation that lasts for years and ties you in to years of cost even if you decide to close the shop? That’s before you even start thinking about business rates.

The bottom line is, if we want vibrant town centres we have to be prepared to pay more council tax, and/or more income tax. Or we could all just lie around waiting for stuff to be conveyed to us by underpaid people. The Wall-E comparison upthread was quite apt, I thought.

I don't shop for social interaction, but I prefer shopping in an actual shop rather than buying things online. I hope that people will go back to the high street when they can.
That said, I popped into town today. The only shops that were busy were Costa, Paperchase, and a shop selling locally produced food and gifts. Make what you will of that.

More people shopping online.

I really, really don't want to lose my local high street. I choose a place to live that has butchers, bakers, greengrocers, florist etc. But it can get increasingly frustrating as many are old fashioned.

For example my village has fantastic Christmas lights. It's very busy with families coming to see them. Is the sweet shop open past 4.30pm? No. Is the toy shop open? No. Are any of the three independent coffee shops open? Nope. But the Costa is. The cake shop? Nope. There's no issue with planning, all these shops could stay open but they choose not to. I don't understand why!

Drivers seem to complain about paying to parking whatever the cost.
It's about £1.70 for a couple of hours here and the town Facebook group is awash with people moaning that it's £1.20 in another town. When parking was free they were moaning that workers were using it.

With regard to our experiences with our local BID - we teamed up with a business owner who with a team of others pitched for and got funding for a Sunday street market on the next street along from ours that ran for five Sundays the first year and four the next.The person who had the original idea valued our alternative approach and performance and design backgrounds. We provided costumes, did some performance,helped with promotion as much as we could and pulled together attractions such as classic cars and bikes to be displayed etc etc. For this we were allowed a free stall - it was close to our shop which was also open on the market days. We were,if you like "consultants".

The organiser invited us to planning meetings which we did attend, but it was balked at by the BID chairman because we were not levy payers.Press releases put out to our local paper which referenced us and our contributions were edited to omit us, despite the marketing company responsible for the PR including us. There is a slightly petty "pay to play" mentality in our town sadly.

The market came to a halt after the organiser couldn't afford an increase in the rent of their food franchise outlet, and as they no longer had a business in the town could not be involved due to the specifications of the BID funding. The other business organisers involved dropped away,and we weren't able to take it up as the concept required something like 20,000 to take it on.The funding was cut year by year as it was supposed to become self-funding - costs of insurance,road closures and bus re-routing made it prohibitive and not cost effective. Sponsorship was sought but was unsuccessful.

So while the BID in some areas may be inclusive and supportive of those who don't pay the levy, it has not been my experience.

We asked about the possibility of paying the levy anyway, but apparently even if you do that, you are excluded from voting on BID matters.

So all the ideas of collectives and other things to stimulate the dying high street are so chock full of bureaucracy and conditional on so many things, it becomes quite wearisome. If you don't have enough money to be a prominent player, or good friends in the council, nothing else matters.

Agree with a PP who made a comment about the financial commitment of a physical shop. When you can be in business online for a few hundred quid, why on Earth would you take out a lease on a shop? So not only are high streets competing against chains and retail parks, but the niche, browsable shops which rely on atmosphere etc are also competing against all the online boutiques with good Instagram pages.

@Iamthewombat - I agree with the whole lease thing needing an overhaul.Landlords just want a long term commitment and the steady income.Why they can't adapt and do rolling year on year contracts as exist in the residential sector I do not understand.

However, some landlords will allow pop up shops for a limited time in empty premises - these mostly seem to accommodate entrepreneurial students as we are a big university town with alot of art / creative types.

I note the people who suggest that we have to adapt and provide services or "experiences" - I sell widgets, so effectively I have to learn a skill or change my entire business model which might require change of use, environmental health applications, licenses, extra insurance etc. There is a market for my widgets,it's getting people through the door. It used to be hard but manageable.Now, thanks to the virus,it's nigh on impossible.

My sales target per day to keep the bills paid and buy stock is a mere 100.00. It's not unrealistic. Charity shops take five times that.

You're right - no-one owes me a living, which is why we opened a shop.Our market research was sound. This year has been the killer. I've never made a wage from the shop. Every penny has gone to keeping it running, and my DP supports me (I'm pretty low maintenance though). My landlord has a yacht moored at the local marina. Clearly I am in the wrong business.

The problem with a lot of small independent shops is that they believe being small and independent is selling point enough. It isn’t. If I can get the same thing at the Tesco Express two doors down for significantly less, why wouldn’t I?

There’s a big independent ethnic food shop on our high street and I’ve never known it quiet. They sell a huge array of things I either rarely see elsewhere or actually discovered there. I love a mooch around there and will often find something new to try. They have given themselves a USP and are thriving because of it. THAT’S what’s needed in an independent shop - not independence alone.

Councils need to stop flogging a dead horse and trying to force the survival of retail in area where it’s no longer needed. Our local bank closed last year and is now being turned into apartments, but the developers are being forced to incorporate retail units on the ground floor. There are plenty of empty ones nearby - why actively encourage developers to build more? The council would be much better off offering incentives for retailers to take on existing empty units.

We ran a high street gallery and framing business for 30 years. We developed a good website and did well until about 4 years ago, when our main suppliers, who also had a chain of their own galleries, started their own website selling direct to our customers. As they had a much larger budget than us we didn't really stand a chance. In addition to this, footfall in our shopping centre fell by 25% in the 5 years up to 2018. Fortunately, we were close to retiring age, so we closed, four people lost their jobs, the shop is still empty and I can't see anyone taking it on in the current climate. For a small shop the rent, rates and service charge were over £70,000 per year, plus every year we seemed to get extra health and safety requirements to do. Electric circuit checks, PAT testing, testing of fire extinguishers - it never ended. The problem is. There is a shitload of empty retail premises, with millions of £s tied up in them, a lot of it in pension funds. It will take decades for uses to be changed. What could you do with an empty shopping centre with a multi storey carpark?

The high street and independent retailers have been on the way down for at least 30 years, since out of town retail parks were permitted to be built. The botched local government reorganisation of the 1970s in part helped this, as the new retail parks were often beyond the borough/city/town council boundaries. The rural districts/boroughs were very keen to have them, as they added greatly to their income from business rates.

Then there have been a number of factors since, not least of which the unified business rate, no reform of that or corporation tax to reflect the internet age and trans national companies, and there deregulation of bus services in the late 1980s.

I agree with you OP.

It is very area dependant. I live in a small northern city...rents and business rates are reasonable and even now there are new independent shops opening. Not everything does well and things do seem to change over but on the whole there are some fantastic independent shops that are doing pretty well! I think it helps that it's a small enough city that most people do their shopping in the city centre and that the council seem genuinely interested in incentivising small businesses. There's a street with only independent businesses and every weekend it's rammed, like queuing down the road for a new bakery rammed!