The future of Britain’s high streets in this digital world
Over the past ten years, we have seen the decline of Britain’s pubs and high street shops. The pubs began their decline during the recession and the smoking ban.  The shops began their decline after the rise of sites like Amazon and Ebay and many other online stores, along with business rate hikes, government cut backs and high rents.
I mean, let’s be honest, how many of you have seen an item, like a toy for example, in the shop and then gone onto your phone to see how much it is on Amazon? We don’t want to be doing this, because, I don’t believe any of us want to see the high street stores disappearing, however, if the item is quite a few pounds cheaper, then we are going to buy the item on Amazon, right? Especially at Christmas time when every penny counts. Â
Of Britain’s top 500 high streets, 1234 shops have closed in the first half of 2019. Between 2012 and 2017 online clothing shopping sales have doubled with stores like Asos, Boohoo, Mainline Menswear etc.  The online clothing stores now own 40% of the market. However, they do face their own problems like serial returners thus creating a phantom economy. Many shoppers are buying clothes, wearing them once or twice and then returning them.  This creates false sales profits for these companies and actually costing them money in postage and administration costs in sorting the returns out.
There are some shopping experiences you just cannot buy online like getting your hair cut, or having your nails done. Â Over the last ten years we have seen more and more of these pop up in our high streets, with some high streets having about 5 nail bars in one street. Â These kind of stores are doing better than ever, but that is not going to fill up the whole high street. Takeaway stores are doing a booming trade at the moment, but most of these even have delivery apps now so footfall is not needed.
There is something wonderful about browsing the high street shops, sometimes you don’t really know what you are looking for, especially when looking for Christmas gifts and the like. Whilst looking around, suddenly you will see a gift that you think somebody would like, and you would never have found this online or even thought of it. Â
We have already lost Woolworths, HMV, BHS, Dixons, Jane Norman, Barratts, Maplin, Toys R Us, Blockbusters, Comets and many others. Â Who remembers Fads?Â
It has recently been suggested that a four day week could help boost the economy.  Put in simple terms, the idea is that on that extra day off, people will be out spending and putting money back into the economy/businesses. This then gives the business more money to spend on more efficient business systems that will have a more efficient output, which will cover the workload that needs covering by the loss of a human. You can read more about this on Fingertips’ blog page https://fingertipstyping.co.uk/blog/four-day-week-and-flexible-working-could-it-benefit-our-economy.
What do you think about this and also about the high street article above? Â We would love to hear your thoughts.
