Poll. Did you stick to the high street or switch to out of town?

[IncompleteSenten]

Not a taat but inspired by. Purely because I'm curious and polls make posters honest 😁

High streets are ghost towns now. When the alternatives that led to this happening first sprung up did you

YABU - I stuck to the high street 80%-100% of the time until the shops all closed and I had absolutely no alternative.

YANBU - I switched to the big supermarkets and the retail parks and home delivery etc 80% - 100% of the time

If you are too young to have had the choice please don't vote 😁

Used to be a city centre shopper, as it's a 30 min nice walk round the docks and I like to try things on. However now M&S have left our city centre and Debenhams closed, there are not many shops I like. Also my walking route is now a main road one due to a pedestrian bridge being closed for repairs for 2 years. So may have to drive to the out of town one instead.
We do most of the food shop in a supermarket, but sometimes get bits from the greengrocers.

A combination mostly

I use supermarkets mostly for food shopping. We do have a fab butchers and greengrocers in my local town that I use if I’m feeling a bit flush - they’re quite a bit more expensive than the supermarkets unfortunately.

Clothes, etc, usually online shopping - where I live, there are fuck all clothes shops. Either online or I’ll go to the city nearby.

My local, small, nice town the high street is flourishing tbh. We’ve got a good variety of small independent shops and the town is busy all year round these days. It used to be very seasonal - I live in a holiday area. I can wander down, have a mooch, nice lunch and wander back home.

Our main town is dying on its arse. Even H&M shipped out. Nearly every other shop is empty. The council is putting various ‘hubs’ into the empty shops, which is great on one hand, but we need actual shops. Not helped by £6 for 2 hour parking charges.

My nearest JL etc., is Oxford Circus. I try and avoid that as much as possible and it’s manic and more difficult now with a toddler and trying to carry shopping. We sometimes drive to Stratford Westfield as we can more easily park. We mostly shop online now as it’s more convenient (prefer do more fun things on the weekend than shop). We are fortunate to have an excellent fishmonger and grocer 5m walk from our house so I often pop out at lunch to get fish and vegetables for dinner. Heavy and bulky items are done online.

I switched.

High street shops are more expensive and less convenient. I would much sooner drive out to a retail park with free parking.

I only use the high street a couple of times during the week as I can walk from my office. But theres very little choice out there.

We have a very vibrant town centre with lots of shops which I use a lot. I also use the supermarket on the edge of town as it's the only decent sized one locally. There is an Aldi and an M&S foodhall in the vicinity of the supermarket to give choice.

We used to go once a year to C&A in the nearest city . It was really exciting I remember. I used to look forward to that more than the school holidays. We'd sometimes go into town on market day. Half an hour by bus. We'd have lunch in Littlewoods cafe and look round all the market stalls.

I feel about a hundred years old right now 😂

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in my mid-sized town high street watching a steady stream of people saunter past. It's not dead yet but unreasonable landlords and chain store management are doing their best (we have the last high street M&S in the county but it's just announced plans to move to the new retail park).

not my experience either, we have a great high street in my town, and also great shops in nearby city. Saying that I do shop online quite a bit to save time as I dislike shopping

It is simply not in the power of the individual consumer to contribute meaningfully to the survival (or demise) of the high street.

I am "old enough to remember" the high street, yes, no need to be patronising though. It used to sell things I needed. It no longer sells things I need. It's that simple.

As soon as it goes back to selling the things I need, I will use it.

I do use the high street for:

• Independent shops selling miscellaneous hardware goods eg when I need a drain plug of a specific size
• Shonky phone repair shops, you know type - they've been a godsend at times
• Key cutting and shoe cobbling
• Independent cheap housekeeping shops that sell buckets, plastic stools, nylon bags, peg octopuses, etc

Clothes? No. Read my anecdote upthread. Clothes shops on the high street are not fit for purpose.

What on earth makes you think I'm being patronising?

I think this poster raises an interesting point. This is close to what I see around where I live too (southeast/Greater London). Very local high streets i.e the one most people can walk to are the ones that are in better shape with cafes, bars, independent shops. The actual 'nearest town' ones are the ones that are looking like ghost towns sometimes. i.e the county/bigger towns that serve lots of local communities. I guess these are the ones that suffer more from the fact that local government has consistently failed to maintain decent bus routes to get to them and have overseen the extortionate parking charges. Really I see this as a failure of local government over the last few decades.

Also these are the ones that had mainly chain stores and we have lost a lot of these that didn't keep up with changing shopping trends, didn't offer online ordering for collection in store, didn't offer free returns etc.

Contrast that with shops like Nike (only picking this because was recently shopping for trainers with DC). I was really impressed that you could go and browse and see what you wanted, try on etc, but at the till points you can login with your online id, get a discount for doing so if you buy in store or order the right size or colour they don't carry in store or whatever then and there for free delivery to store or home with free returns. They also offered in store only further discounts as an incentive to buy in store. H&M are going in the same direction. This is the kind of flexibility modern shops need if they want to exist in town centres I think.

And small independents need the local councils to do something about greedy commercial landlords who own whole swathes of properties in a town and force them out with ridiculous leases.

I’ve not voted as technically I think I fall into the too young camp, but I remember going ‘to town’ a lot as a young teen for ‘shopping’ etc but then as the retail parks popped up that was where mum would take us to buy more/bigger stuff. Kid spending pocket money was definitely the high street but needing to kit out an entire family PE kit was JJB (remember them…) on the retail park, likewise curry’s/comet etc for white goods. Plus the retail parks always had food and cinemas/bowling alleys etc in the early days round my way, and you could park the car. As kids we used to go to town on the bus. Even when I learned to drive, which was early 2000’s navigating the town centre and finding somewhere to park was crap compared to re out of town and that was before the mass introduction of ANPR car parks with a set of rules and regs you’d have overstayed your parking time in order to read.

I think there was a good 5-10yr crossover when both seemed to work in unison, and offered different things in that the high street still had a butcher and a couple of bakers but also independent music shops, sports shops etc. going back now it’s just bale shops and betting shops in the town, and even the retail parks are full of empty units as I guess it now mostly moves online.

Today I am quite jealous of people who can use a high street, but find they are quite inaccessible to the average working couple who do 8.30-5.30 with a commute. The cafes and independent food places especially do a roaring trade on a Saturday.

About 33:67 high street:out of town retail for offline shopping but do a fair amount of online shopping as well. Maybe 20:40:40 for me.

Most places I know with thriving high streets are local centres in large cities where the shops have a BIG population in easy walking distance and there are no "out of town" type developments nearby. Even there, the businesses are mostly either those you need to visit in person (salons, barbers, cafes, restaurants) or those which need to be nearby (hot food takeaways).

I do know a couple of places with thriving little town centres. They tend to be in affluent parts of the country and to have had a massive increase in the local population due to housing developments. So, while each person may be using the high street less, the number of potential customers has increased. I'm thinking of places like Bicester in Oxfordshire and Bishop's Cleeve in Gloucestershire. It strikes me that in both cases, there is also a pretty sizable supermarket - and thus lots of free car parking - close to the high street, which probably doesn't hurt!

High Streets still very much alive around here. Last time I went to the retail park (Next have closed in town and now only have OOT presence) it took me over 1 hour to get off the retail park on a midweek afternoon. I won't be going there again any time soon! Town centre shopping all the way for me.

My local high street is full of independent shops but the council are doing their best to destroy it with the parking charges
The next town had a Debenham that shut now the town more or less empty except for restaurants/cafes, nail bars and vape shops
It's very sad

@IncompleteSenten yes going to the market and Littlewoods cafe was something I did with my mum too.
Although "going to the market" was more of a chore type shopping - ie getting food and not exactly exciting.
When I am in my hometown now visiting I love the town centre ("High Street") because it's full of charity shops, cafés, board game cafés etc. It has a more specialist farmers market and craft market now rather than an everyday grocery shop type market. There's street performers and a much more "cafe culture" environment.
But there seems to be a massive obsession in the town that because M+S etc has moved to "The Retail Park" it means the town centre is dying and dreadful. It's not. It's just evolved.

My son goes to board game cafes and cat cafes quite a lot. He loves them.

I'm not going to get on my soapbox about the issues I have with cat cafes 😁

Like I said earlier my own high street is fine, (mega tourist area) I keep reading about the dying high street and am curious.

@IncompleteSenten a lot of (older) people in many towns are set in their ways and go on and on about how the weekly market is gone or down to 5 stalls (yet they do all the food shopping at a giant Tesco Extra now because it's all under one roof) or the High Street is "dead" because M+S moved out (I do not understand the M+S obsession - it's fine for knickers but how often do you need new ones).
It's all very odd.

I work.
So I’m out of the house by 7.30am and finish around 5pm, five days a week.
Most high st shops close at 5.30-6pm.
I’m not prepared to spend hours trudging around shops at the weekend looking for a specific item, coming home empty-handed and then spending 5 minutes online sitting with a coffee, locating exactly what I want.
So shopping on the high st tends to be me visiting Brighton or London every other month for a shopping experience.
Otherwise it’s supermarkets open til 10pm or online.

@NorthStarRising that is such a thing in many towns - it gets to 5 or 5.30pm and it's "Shutters Down Town Is CLOSED" 😂
They must lose so much potential trade.
More trade, more jobs (staff who work daytime plus different staff who work evenings)...I just don't understand it.
I went to go into a charity shop once and was told "sorry we are closing now". I said something like "Oh...why so early?" - the answer "well it is 4 o'clock" 😂

Well, fair enough with the charity shops. They’re staffed by volunteers. If they can’t get the volunteers, they can’t open.

That takes me back again. Wednesday was half day closing. Shops had really short hours the rest of the week and we never thought anything of it.

Oh god. All that's missing now is me telling you that it used to be all fields where the new shopping centre is 🤦