I wish they'd replace the chippies with cannabis dispensaries here. Though then they might need to open new chippies to serve the stoners. Win-win, maybe?

Every time a big box store (Staples, Best Buy, Toys R Us that kinda thing) location in my area closes down, it's not replaced with another. Instead one of those liquidation "Amazon returns" type stores opens. It makes retail look very sick.

The harsh reality is that more often than not the shops don't add much value over ordering online and having it delivered. Of course there are exceptions, but even then malls are more convenient and have easier parking.

Progress will unavoidably kill more and more physical shops, but this has huge cons: cities are emptier and more dangerous.

In the average European mediterranean city shops provide lights, vibe, safety.

As people feel less secure, because it's getting dark at 5-6 pm half the year (the time people usually leave work) and shops are closed, they also go downtown less accelerating the death of other businesses.

And the only people on the streets are either those returning home, drunks, or immigrants doing god knows what. And this progressive decay accelerates. The only shops left are then bought en masse by foreign entrepeneurs, often working the place with their families 16 hours per day to squeeze pennies.

Any random downtown in Italy bar the most touristic places that have people all year suffers of this, even major centers (100k+ citizens).

Remove cars, let people have a pint in the sun. The vast majority of the failure of the city is that we’ve moved so far away from what a city is, instinctually, that we don’t notice that they are entirely unpleasant places to be now.

We've build our urban centers as places that prioritize cars over people, and we're suddenly confused as to why people don't want to spend time in them.

They don't have inventory/consumables which makes money laundering easier. The low transaction cost makes paying cash normal. The primary cost is labor and they force the indentured employees to pay it back for 'living expenses'.

Nail salons make a lot of money. manicures and pedicures cost a lot, depending on the class level they might be $50-$500. Supplies cost almost nothing. The workers are usually immigrants making very little living in communal housing.

Same in other European countries, usually the rumors are they take advantage of business sponsorship activities, or some kind of money laundry, taxes evasion.

Cheap to patronize, low barrier to entry, and can’t be done over the internet.

My guess would be that for middle class people, it's a simple luxury that is considered worth stretching for and reasonably easy to budget around.

Logistics. They tend to act as the maul for unethical products.

Glasgow at one point had eight American Candy Stores that were always empty but been operational for years. Not even good American Candy.

Incredibly low capex and opex so once you've got it running you can basically just throttle the business in accordance with demand.

Laundry.

First pic in the article is a pedestrian street without cars. Not sure it's fixed anything.

And what will people do there? There's only so many restaurants and pubs a street can support.

That works if people live within walking distance of the high street. Do they? No, they don't.

They are well past these simple mobility solutions. The reasons and economic, demographic, and geopolitical.

"just take a leisure 5-mile stroll every time you need something other than groceries, bro."

it never ceases to baffle me to see the progressive cosmopolitan types being utterly detached from the reality they live in.

If you’d read the article you’d know that’s part of the problem. 2000 free spaces out of town at the retail park, 1300 spaces in town, which will cost you £20 for an afternoon’s shopping.

Rethink business rates, crack down on shoplifting, change the welfare system to encourage work, tax internet shopping (temu, etc).

Or just accept the world has moved on.

> multinationals

To be specific, Amazon (its business model) killed small* goods shops in city centers.

The only businesses still open are services (food/restaurants, health, etc). Because those need you to actually bring your own body near the bodies of others.

___

*: and big, see the Galerie Lafayette/BHV struggles in Paris, they sell items that can largely be delivered in 2 days buying directly from the brand or from Amazon

I don't really think the issue is taxes. The fact the more and more, the default buying habit is to buy on the internet means there is less and less viable business with a brick and mortar shop where you have to pay rent. The U.K is not an exception. In France, Spain, Portugal, I have seen the same things : Either you are a business that sells services, fast food or anything else that is either hardly movable on the internet, or has a significant advantage being able to buy things right away (vape for example, like tobacco shop, you don't want to wait tomorrow to have your nicotine fix), or you die off.

It's also a vicious circle : Because there is less and less physical shop selling specific goods, you have to turn to the internet, which mean local businesses get less traffic and die off. If you have any slightly niche hobby and do not live in a major metropolis, you are SoL. As an example, I would have to go 200km away to buy raw leather and leatherwork tools despite living in one of the biggest city in my country.

> Local business owners are taxed to death.

And the ones left aren’t paying taxes, or wages.

I don't think it's taxes so much as compliance cost of setting up and running a location. BigCo can hire specialists to figure out "ackshually no this is why my site plan is compliant than you very much" and hire them at cost whereas the local guy has to get kicked in this dick by some hired engineering firm's or law firm's profit margin for the same service aaaand gets a worse service on top because the local business who wants to keep doing business there can't fight for their client like some guy in an office at BigCo can.

Even if you control for the Amazon factor or the Walmart factor by looking at services, the bulk of these "successful" businesses are either chains or owned by a bigger corperate entity that can do kind of the same thing.

It's massive corruption at HMRC. You cannot explain it otherwise.

40 years of Thatcherism.

Good manufacturing jobs were gutted and sent overseas with no thought or care what the impact on communities would be. In some places families are now on the third generation on benefits because there simply aren't any jobs and the ones that are available require skills that people don't have because they aren't taught them in school due to the obsession with the Victorian education model and the shortage of skilled teachers and training opportunities for young people.

At this point nothing except for a total economic rebuild will save the UK high street and there is zero political will to do that because the current broken system makes certain people money.

London has been basically subsisting off the remains of the empire while everything else just crumbles.

Also for Frenchman to say re les Anglais "what I perceived was their refinement"... there's a joke that the only people who think the English are refined are Americans (as we are a savage people).

Such money as there is is spent at malls on the ring road.

The manufacturing employees, such as there are, drive everywhere, often live far from town, shop online or at out-of-town megastores.

It's an individualist, selfish culture since Thatcher or before, there's little of the pride in local businesses or local culture that France enjoys.

Dumb Brits became pure consumers since 1982, and blame black people and Muslims for why there's "no British culture anymore", instead of recognising their role in making it happen.

The great thing about towns like this is the journey leaving them. This isn't an isolated example either. Most towns I've been to have a derelict High Street.

What was your impression of London ?

This’ll cheer you up: Northampton is used as a case study for a successful post-industrial town. Below average unemployment, above average services and citizen satisfaction.

And it’s true. Northampton is doing pretty great compared to a majority of the U.K.

How will the bus cost more than £1-2 per 15 minutes, are buses very expensive in the UK, or are you just not spending very much time at these stores?

I will say, that sounds expensive for parking, but completely not out of line with what I would expect to pay for premium (location) parking, though I'm used to VHCOL parking rates and maybe you don't live in that big of a city.

In cities with good public transport few people take the car to the city center, yet the shops are dead. There also hasn’t been a major reduction in parking over the last couple of decades that would explain the phenomenon.

I lived in Britain for more than a decade and the thing I missed the most from the continent was good, German/Turkish style kebabs than the sorry excuse with a soggy pita they sell in UK.

Ugh, really?

As a Brit that’s moved to Australia let me say the kebab shops here are a revelation. The meat is nicely cooked, generally identifiable, and not swimming in grease. The bread is usually more like real Greek gyros bread, the salad fresh…

My memories of Kebabs in the UK is of very dubious slices of something coming off the elephant-leg at the back of the store, nothing you would ever consider when sober.

If you are American, it’s a “thrift store/thrifting”.

In the uk virtually all thrift stores are run by a well known charity and thus the locals call them charity shops.

Shops run by charities (similar to US 501.c.3 'nonprofits'), which are exempt from certain business taxes.

What the hell is a charity shop? Like a storefront for a non profit that you can donate money to or a shop with cheap subsidized groceries for poor people?

With the Home Office’s Wastewater Analysis for Narcotics Detection (WAND) they found at £9.8 billion the Cocaine industry is 4 times what had previously been assumed. That's a lot of dirty money launder.

Sad but true, when economic times get tough then the grey/black market can survive better.

So you’re ok that high streets are just peddling to your own addiction?