It's a strange one. My local high street is decimated. There's literally 5 empty shops in between each open shop and parking is insanely expensive - we went to see a show at our local theatre recently, and it cost £7 to park for 3 hours.
Councils seem stuck in an 80s mindset of what a high street should look like.
When I've travelled to somewhere like a big shopping centre, it's vaguely price pointed, so John Lewis is with M&S, Joules, Fat Face, White Stuff (targeting the same demographic) and New Look is near Primark and River Island, so you feel like there's loads of shops to look in your budget. But in our town, each shop is about 15 min walk from one another, passing about 9 empty shops, so it feels much worse than it is.
Shops aren't helping themselves. They don't carry in many sizes - if you ask, you get told "you can order online" - well, there's no point in coming into your store is there?!
Our town also only open 9am-5pm Monday-Saturdays. So I cant nip in and get anything during the week, and now people are working from home, they've lost the lunchtime trade as well. On a weekend, a Saturday is taken up with DC activities, leaving only Sundays, which is when all the independent shops are shut. So even when I want to buy something, I literally can't.
Our town council are so against the out of town retail parks, that they put up huge barriers. It was well known that M&S wanted to look at moving into an old Toys R Us unit - a huge one, which could have been awesome for homewares and everything else. But our council literally bought the unit to prevent M&S from moving in and to keep them on the high street. M&S are now known to be closing stores - why the fuck would they choose to keep our store open when the council have literally prevented them from expanding?