UK high street will ‘face same fate as dinosaurs’ if retailers continue to fail to adapt

21 comments

1. An asteroid?

2. The bit about councils and town planners hit home for me.

   Yes shopping habits have moved more online but that’s a thing that’s happened over the span of two decades it’s hardly a new thing.

   My local town is just such a clusterfuck to get into by car with barely any parking and it’s so bad that a lot of traders are just refusing work in the center because it’s such a pain in the arse.

   You can’t blame local shops when the whole system is designed in such a way to prevent people from shopping locally.

   Rents have also been another factor, ducking extortionate here for commercial properties.

3. Tax the fuck out of online retail and youll get your high street back. 

4. There is no easy answer to this because there are so many individual players with so many conflicting viewpoints.

   Also, from the political point of view, I think governments have an old-fashioned value of “shops equals good”. They would rather see a company with a profitable shop than an even more profitable online business.

5. Legalize weed and make the high street full of smokeries and eateries. 🤤

6. Well shit, I need to keep away from highstreets then. Don’t want to get him by them meteorites.

7. If it didn’t cost like £90 to park in any city centre, that’s given you’re able to even navigate your way in and find a fucking spot, then more of us may be more inclined to shop at retailers.

8. – Rents being owned by private landlords with no social responsibility or care means that it’s a capitalist free for all. Why have a nice interesting shop when rents can be increased to the point where only vapes/cocktail bars/convenience store/same shops can settle in.

   – Everything being expensive also makes it so food offers have to be either fancier and more expensive, or shittier and cheaper to be sold at volume. The middle ground is getting lost.

   – Example: my local high street only had one green grocer, it was very accessible and cheap, and lots of old people flocked around to get their organic real vegetables and fruit. Landlord raised rent by 3x, it’s now the 8th café in the High Street.

   – There is also the old joke of stores only being open 9-5, which is when office people are working. As far as I know. I have never been to some shops that I wanted, but I’m not taking a day off work to go to a butchers.

   – If this is what is mentioned by “adapting”, sure. High streets are doomed, which is a shame. But the high street is getting more full of boring repetitive and transactional chains. Social clubs and local places for common benefit are losing out while public/private fight.

9. We would have been better off keeping the royal mail and preferencing it and making it into fast, excellent service which could then give lower cost postage to our own UK companies and that way allow homegrown companies to compete with foreign companies which already have amazing logistics that they solely owe, ie Amazon. Basically creating a single public service which could mimic Amazon strengths but offer it to English businesses to allow them to access the benefits of scale.

   That way high streets chains and shops could have benefited from royal mail rather than just having all its city centre sites sold off.

10. The same fate? Is that being pretty fucking awesome like dinosaurs bro come on what are we even talking about!?

    I wouldn’t mind sharing that fate.

11. Yep! All you independent retailers, and even big chains, just adapt to the insane rental prices of high street stores. Who cares about profits anyway! The important thing is that privaye pension funds are secure in thier high street property investments and can charge whatever the fuck they like!

12. I have a compromise: make a virtual high street to broaden the online shopping experience. It will incorporate AI, so you will have virtual shop assistants that can converse with you for any questions you might have, and go through transactions with you. Care declined? No problem, they will start acting irate and they will ask you to leave if payment isn’t forthcoming.

    What happens if another shopper irritates you? Simple, take them next door for a PvP deathmatch. The loser is frozen from shopping for a while and incapable of trolling other shoppers while frozen out.

13. Ok.  Good.  Make town and city centres back into places where people can live instead then.

14. Towns that have free parking have more active high streets.

15. I mean stores are open while I work except weekends when it’s heaving.

    When am I meant to go?

    Let’s say I have a day off do I spend it fighting for expensive parking to go look at shops that don’t have most of the stock in store and are more expensive than online?

    Or do I order what I need online whatever time?

    Hmmmmm I wonder.

16. Council/government can pay the rent for new shops. Not chains. Not gambling. Not vapes. Decent shops.

    They can pay back a % of their profits. If the shop doesn’t make money, they don’t pay rent.

    This is a 12 month deal.

    If they make a good turn over, they’ll do well. If not, we’ll, they tried.

    The rent on high street shops is fucking eye watering.

17. Spielberg will make a film about them?

18. How are they supposed to compete when online is 20% cheaper without the same overheads and able to transfer its profits to a beneficial tax jurisdiction?

19. High rents

    The end. Nothing else to say. It has nothing to do with people, online, parking, prices, whatever, it’s high rent.

    Retailers ‘don’t need to adapt’, we just have to end landlordism. But we won’t. And the media will continue to ignore the biggest elephant in every room and pretend otherwise.

20. Hit by asteroid?

21. You mean flee online and avoid tax by operating out of some other country?

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