2025 to be ‘worst year for high street since Covid’ as ‘200,000 jobs to be cut’
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/2025-worst-year-high-street-34393507#ICID=Android_StarNewApp_AppShare
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2025 to be ‘worst year for high street since Covid’ as ‘200,000 jobs to be cut’
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/2025-worst-year-high-street-34393507#ICID=Android_StarNewApp_AppShare
Posted by dailystar_news
23 comments
Simple solution… VAT is not charged for purchases in non-online shops…
Its ok, 2 tier kier has a plan for 2 tier growth
This has been happening slowly for years ever since Chinese manufacturing, first local companies screwed us over for big profits as glorified middlemen, much later on Jeff took the torch and ran with it, now we buy direct from China, recovery will be hard, especially as China don’t really need us per say, but fuck do we need them.
So much of our economy is middlemen and the service industry.
We are entering into the next Great Depression…
House of Fraser in Bluewater closed its doors yesterday. The high street is dead
Ah yes, the doom and gloom that makes us Brits who we are.
What is actually on the high street anymore? Multiple ‘turkish’ barbers, Asian nail salons, corner shops etc. Theres nothing to do
The UK has truly become a living museum
Will only get worse until we finally become the 51st State. I accepted our fate in 2016. Sad times.
Internet been around for years, so if companies haven’t adjusted business model by now then that’s on them.
Most city centres are now slums anyway, Eastern European barbers, kebab/peri peri takeaways, vape shops, bookies and Poundland. Drunks ,homeless and beggars on every corner. Same thing all over the UK.
Most are in ruins and still look like they’re straight out of the 60s/70s with endless brutalist concrete architecture left over.
Combine that with extortionate business rates and ridiculous parking charges we have the state we’re in today.
Close it all down turn it into housing it’s finished.
Gosh I wonder why this is happening?
Surely it’s nothing to do with wage stagnation? Or inflation? Or the ever increasing cost of living? Or the massive percentage of people’s income being spent on housing?
No, it most be something else….
I tried to do my shopping in town. I walked about for 2 hours and got about a third of what I wanted. Then I paid £7.50 for one bratwurst (!!!), sat down and got the other 2/3 in 10 minutes on the phone before going home.
This is what’s wrong with the high street. Too expensive and less convenient than the internet.
High street retailers need to come up with clever ways to make themselves unique and interesting instead of putting the same cut/paste set of chain shops in every town. Each chain has an online store which is better than the shop. Make town centres unique and interesting again with small independent retailers selling unique items so I can browse and see things I won’t find with a google search.
And make things affordable again. Prices only ever go in one direction, but when disposable income drops we need more affordable items and fewer things which are ridiculously expensive (like. £7.50 bratwurst).
On Line Shopping.
I’ve no idea why… I’m on my way now. 1.5 hours to crawl along the potholed roads the mile into town. Only to pay nearly a fiver an hour to park up.
To a high street with nothing in it and no benefit to actually going there.
Need free parking on high streets – remove pedestrian only areas – then it becomes convenient, busy & congested like a high streets should be – not a derelict faceless shithole
Problem being we don’t all really have the time to drive 20 to the High Street and drive 20 mins back and walk to and from the shops and queue. After paying £4:80 an hour to park.
Or to walk to a bus stop and wait 20 mins for a bus for a 20 min bus ride and again to get home and be charged £5.00 for the return fare in order to pick up the Tatt that eBay and Amazon sell !
My days of being chased off by a Traffic warden in a local High Street /Town Centre are long gone
Too many people. I don’t want to have to carry heavy bags around, whilst also guarding my wallet, avoiding people asking for my time/money, drunk people, pickpockets, and groups of people that decide it’ll a great idea to walk in a horizontal line.
Anything in town I can have brought to me and avoid all the negative aspects of shopping. It’s awesome.
Living in a socialist paradise.
It’s because it’s outdated. It’s simply outdated. Who the fuck wants to walk around shops, listening to women scream at kids, getting bothered by beggars, avoiding smackheads, standing in queues and on top of that pay 20 percent more than online – and pay parking fees with the fear of an ANPR letter with a fine through the door, maybe.
And after all that you might not even find what you want!
It’s an outdated 80s exploit.
A tsunami is coming!
Thing is, how many of these 200k jobs were actually subsidised by in work benefits?
Cast your mind back to the lockdowns; at that point we had two choices. Grasp the nettle and use the downtime to start reimagining and reinventing our urban centres or kick the can down the road and try to keep everything on ice in the naive hope that everything would go back to normal (whatever normal was, given high street retailers was on its arse even before covid).
To the surprise of absolutely nobody, our unimaginative and thoroughly captured government of the time chose the latter but that was never sustainable. Workers increasingly don’t want those jobs, customers increasingly don’t want to use high street chains. At this point we are simply pumping money in via benefits to subsidise poverty pay, prop up zombie companies and keep the commercial real estate bubble inflated.
What Labour have done is slapped a premium on those jobs and put the onus on employers to actually get bang for buck out of staff. Productivity, in other words. Go and look at the KPMG and other service sector surveys also out today. Opposite story: most respondents forecasting higher revenues and more hiring. In other words, good employers offering jobs with actual prospects aren’t scared by higher NICs. Shitty employers just lurching from crisis to crisis offering poverty pay and expecting the taxpayer to top up the difference are shuffling off this mortal coil. Sorry, but I won’t be shedding any tears.
Let’s see high streets freed up for more independent businesses filling the gap left by chains and keeping money in communities, more leisure spaces, more culture spaces, just better use of space than keeping the currently landscape which everybody apparently hates lumbering on.
It’s been obvious that change has been needed for *years* but we can’t achieve that if we are too afraid to let things happen and try something new.
You can’t have a consumer based economy when your consumers cant afford to consume **OR** realise they don’t *need* to consume what you’re trying to sell them. I’ll be honest it’s years since I’ve shopped on a Highstreet because the Highstreet doesn’t sell what I want to buy. the Highstreet sells what it thinks it can make the best profit on whether I want/need it or not.
I have family members that were part of the ‘redecorate the whole place every 18 months/new wardrobe 3x a year’ gang that have woken up in the past year or so and realised they don’t actually need to, want to, or like doing it and were doing it only because they’ve been aggressively af marketed to their whole lives.
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