The post you are reporting:
It's all good and well spitting out comments which utterly condemn large corporations as being "evil" and "satanic" or claiming that we are all being somehow brainwashed by expensive advertising but everyone is missing one very important fact in this whole matter. The "shopper" is not as dumb as the anti-advertising people would like to think, and certainly not as much a victim as the "big shops are evil" people would have us believe. The opposite is true. The "shopper" is generally quite savvy these days, being highly empowered with their choices thanks to the accessibility of online resources and the aggressive competition afforded by those evil large companies.
Just to use an obscure example, I used to have to travel to Dean Street in London to find exotic and rare records (obviously long before the Internet, and even just at the dawn of CD music). But these days I can travel to any number of big HMV stores, or check out Amazon, Ebay, Play.com, or whatever, and find those same albums in seconds, all priced in such a way that I have genuine, meaningful choices to make based on price, quality, speed of delivery, and so on. "Shopping around" is no longer confined to what the two local shops can offer, it now means we can check out vast global resources if we want to. If we don't mind waiting then we order online - if we want it today then we nip to a suitable store.
I do think that for high streets (as we know them) to survive into the new era they are going to have to embrace the New Shopper's demanding savvy. They will have to innovate, adopt imaginative business practices, and of course this will include some form of help from authorities and business leaders. Small local high street shops are a decaying force and becoming ever more rare.
Keith - I don't say that seeing local high streets going to rot is "progress" but the shopping habits of people and the way the shopping landscape is changing IS progressive, regardless of how this sits with your social or political views. You are still saying this decay is the fault of some major evil force (perhaps the big companies), but I still believe that it is US, the SHOPPERS, who cause these damaging effects because our needs / wants / expectations have changed so much and the high street hasn't kept up.
And as for the "materialistic" argument - oh please!!! We're all consumers, we all like to own nice things, and we all like to spend a bit from time to time. Don't we?
