The post you are reporting:
I regret the demise of the High Street - at least that is as we have known it. Online selling from warehouse style operations has out manoeuvred the retailer in a cataclysmic scale and we only have ourselves to blame!
How often have you gone shopping for an item, only then to go home and look it up on the Internet and buy it cheaper? On the other hand how many of us have found what we want on the Internet, but are not quite sure without seeing it for real so go to a shop. Once satisfied that it is what you want, then go home and order it on line?
I expect to a greater or lesser extent we have all done that. We cannot therefore expect retailers to provide a show room free of charge to the customer but at great expense to them, for the benefit of the online industry.
Rent and rates, the ability to browse comes at a price and it does appear that for the most part we prefer to click a purchase from our sofas and have it delivered, than go to a shop.
Rents are falling, rates stay the same and continue to strangle investment in the High Streets ( actually they are strangling investment in anything that attracts business rates). So what to do?
The Portas project identified that traditional retailing is finished. Specialist shops and artisans aside, it is finished. Community and leisure uses is where the future lies, but there has to be a revolution in the rating requirements to make this happen, which means that we have to get rid of central costs and bureaucratic waste. Of course that is not nearly enough we have to change this lazy "have it all, want it now" society. Can make people realise that life may well be a precious gift, but survival is not a right?
We allow the biggest businesses to dictate what we eat, what it costs to keep warm we even allow them to negotiate how much tax they pay, we contribute fortunes to a dead Europe and overseas aid when we can't even teach our children or sort out our sick.
We are broken, yet it is too painful to admit. How about we admit it and do something about it instead of whining in to our beer!
