The next store to close is....

When making a post, please ensure it complies with this site's Main Rules at all times.
  • I liked Thorntons.... :(


    Were you able to identify what the reason was? It's around the time broadband launched and Amazon expanded beyond music and videos.

    It was mainly due to the rise in internet sales. Secondly, we were in the outdoor clothing and camping market, and outdoor clothing such as Berghaus had become fashionable, but started to then die off.

    The intelligent are being oppressed so the stupid don't get offended

  • It is true that a warehouse can contain a lot more stock (and therefore, choice) than a shop can, but what the shops offer is a personalised experience, which many people prefer.

    Also the social aspect to it too. How many folk would go shopping and then meet up with mates at the coffee shop for a chat. And as we have this whole woman thing in the media right now. Maybe there are some woman that can't wait for an excuse to escape their husband. Maybe they have a secret chat with mates while out or use shopping as an excuse to seek help. In other cases it's good for a man or woman to spend time away from their partner. It's healthy for the marriage. So keeping people at home is going to cause more problems for society.

    Digital life is extremely unhealthy and not a way forward for society whether that is the spread of rumours and media stir or whether that's shopping. Sadly the majority are addicted to this Heroin type drug lifestyle we call the Internet. Give someone a mobile phone and it's like giving someone Crack Cocaine. We now have a society of junkies and it reflects in the behaviour and attitudes of society. Kids growing up are like children born to junkie parents using while pregnant. The digital life and Internet, mobile phones and the rest of it are there in their face handed down by the junkie dealers that go by the name of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google Facebook, ete etc and all their friends are using so they will use too. Fall to the peer pressure as does the Heroin addict.

  • My worry is the real economic pain post Covid will be more crippling than the crash of 2008.

    Will it literally kill off the high street completely?

  • My worry is the real economic pain post Covid will be more crippling than the crash of 2008.

    Will it literally kill off the high street completely?

    I think the high street is going one way, regardless of covid. Councils have been determined to charge a fortune for people to park, and commercial property landlords make it very hard for retailers to survive. Their own greed will finish the high street off, and cost themselves money. Did you know, once the commercial property landlord has leased the property to the tenant, they have no responsibility for it's upkeep. The retailer I worked for used to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds every year repairing roofs etc. Making a profit from retailing at the best of times is so damn hard

    The intelligent are being oppressed so the stupid don't get offended

  • I think the high street is going one way, regardless of covid. Councils have been determined to charge a fortune for people to park, and commercial property landlords make it very hard for retailers to survive. Their own greed will finish the high street off, and cost themselves money. Did you know, once the commercial property landlord has leased the property to the tenant, they have no responsibility for it's upkeep. The retailer I worked for used to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds every year repairing roofs etc. Making a profit from retailing at the best of times is so damn hard

    I fully agree, rents also never reflected the current economic conditions, they were still priced at pre-2008 levels for a lot of businesses.

    It's like the COVID pandemic, I believe there was a real chance to bring life back to the high streets, pedestrianize them, invite open-air markets and stalls, allow outdoor seating, sadly a lot of councils were not productive enough and now I fear the high street will look like early 1980s Britain with everything boarded up.

  • Where I am rents are so high that businesses get IIRC 2 years rent free as an incentive to get business into the area and not make it look so tatty but what happens is that a new business will open, say a pizza restaurant or mobile phone repairs or something and after 2 years they close down ready for a new shop to open and take advantage of 2 years rent free. It's like a smash and grab business and if they are lucky and suitable, like restaurant stuff, the previous business will have decorated and fitted the shop out otherwise they do a quick cheap makeover. The high st was dead long before COVID because of the Internet. COVID is just the icing on the cake, the final kick to make it tumble. Very sad. :( but we could argue that supermarkets and chains had already started to kill off the high st before the Internet.

    The high st has been struggling for years in the same way the traditional pubs have who were also central to the high st and community. What ever happened to markets. Proper old school market stalls out on the street. In London even famous markets like Camden have gone, Portobello is only 'just' holding on because of the rich clientele in local Notting Hill. We should also bring back Rag n Bone men to deal with the rubbish as councils seem to be not very good at that any more. I say rubbish but some folk do throw good stuff out simply because they can't be arsed with eBay or advertising something for free to a good home. We are not even allowed to leave stuff out on the streets with a sign 'free to a good home' without someone trying to hand out fines. Rag n Bone stuff can end up in junk shops. That will get the high streets going again as folk wont be able to afford new stuff and also want to be environmentally friendly through choice and recycle old.

    Cheaper used junk shops could help a lot of folk out who will be living in poverty because of the way the world is going with eradicating jobs and automating everything. Kind of like charity shops who are ofen a rip off with higher prices now. Beside most charities are scam, support scamming charities where their directors and ambassadors rake in all the money for themselves and to help the rich, like Politicians and media celebs money launder and help reduce their taxes. Any excess money is mostly sent abroad where the charities cause often is helping....kiddies or animals abroad, refugees etc. Anything that pulls on the heart strings to draw suckers in. Just as it was years ago with feed the world and band aid. That fed the musicians. Very little went to Africa.

  • Has Thorntons officially gone, heard they were set to close their doors.

    Awful such long established stores disappearing.

  • It will be a good day when the betting shops all close down because of online gambling :P The high streets could end up being full of food banks, homeless shelters, addiction help and other services, and a few coffee shops and fast food take-aways. Or they could be turned into housing for those with money and offices with shared desks for various online work from home kind of things, for those lucky enough to have a job, rental space like a cybercafe type environment for those that prefer to get out of the house.

    Bloody hell...even a shop turned into showers for the homeless to have a wash would be a good thing. Maybe we need some Japanese style living quarters (cubicle) type things with a bed and screen with internet access. Not only do we have the rising homeless and refugee problems but with more folk losing jobs there will be more folk losing their home 'fact', or do we end up like Rio de Janeiro, one side of the city is expensive high rise flats and apartments serving the minority and the rich and the other side of the city is a slum. We could have slums in all the cites across the country. And talking about country I expect development of housing will expand out of the cities more and wipe out more of our countryside and traditional suburbs and villages as we take more refugees from wars we start as well as global warming issues. We could have a whole load of Chinese refugees next. China is on the US and our hit list.

    One things for sure there is going to be a need for a lot of social care, mental health, housing and legal advice services etc. There will most likely be a need for woman's refuges and I would like to say men's too but they tend to get washed aside. With more folk unemployed and more folk staying home with no reason to leave the house there will be an increase in domestic violence. There will probably also be a need for more children's services so maybe some youth clubs could make a come back. At the same time we need to tackle the gang culture as that is only going to get worse and they need somewhere to go.

    There will also be a need for more health centres and gyms. What are all the unemployed going to do otherwise. Maybe we could have indoor gardens / allotments. Hydroponics would work well indoors in cities. They will have to be free or extremely cheap so the unemployed have something to live for and would take pressure off the food banks so they can deal more with those in a more unfit state but it could give them something to aim for. Social clubs is another one. What we need is communities. This is what we have lost along with jobs in an online and automated world and it's only going to get worse. We've lost religion and we are fast losing the pub scene. That's two huge social centres lost from communities so what's left. And the truly sad part is that we can't even blame COVID for it. It hasn't helped but this has been for a while, long before COVID, and still is the direction we are moving in.

  • What a depressing outlook you paint, Norra. For all our sakes, I hope that Boris’s plan for the future has a more optimistic outlook than this.

    For a start, I don’t think that homelessness is something that we need to accept. Those who have fallen on hard times through loss of job or marital breakup should be helped back to normality and those who are mentally ill or simply display anti-social behaviour should be taken into care.

    What is required is for the economy to be reinvigorated and businesses encouraged to operate in those impoverished parts of the country that need them. We need to invest now in our infrastructure and with incentives to encourage industry and the right economic and social policies to get people back into work.

    I believe that the PM has the vision. Let’s see how this plays out.

  • Cheaper used junk shops could help a lot of folk out who will be living in poverty because of the way the world is going with eradicating jobs and automating everything. Kind of like charity shops who are ofen a rip off with higher prices now. Beside most charities are scam, support scamming charities where their directors and ambassadors rake in all the money for themselves and to help the rich, like Politicians and media celebs money launder and help reduce their taxes. Any excess money is mostly sent abroad where the charities cause often is helping....kiddies or animals abroad, refugees etc. Anything that pulls on the heart strings to draw suckers in. Just as it was years ago with feed the world and band aid. That fed the musicians. Very little went to Africa.

    I once knew a guy who was a courier driver. He took something to a very large house. A flash car followed him through the gates, parked on a disk, and his car was lowered to an underground car park. He told me the place was amazing. The guy who owned it was the top man at Mc Millan Nurses. makes you think, doesn't it?

    The intelligent are being oppressed so the stupid don't get offended

  • I once knew a guy who was a courier driver. He took something to a very large house. A flash car followed him through the gates, parked on a disk, and his car was lowered to an underground car park. He told me the place was amazing. The guy who owned it was the top man at Mc Millan Nurses. makes you think, doesn't it?

    One of my scumbag neighbours who just moved out, owns a care home. They had several vehicles between them including two land rovers and a BMW.

    It will be a good day when the betting shops all close down because of online gambling :P

    In a way online gambling is worse as it feeds addiction.

  • The lockdown is being blamed for the demise of the High street shops. This is in part true, but the fact is that Traditional High street shopping was dying long before the Chinese virus hit our shores. IMHO the high streets should be places where people go for entertainment, cafe culture, restaurants and small specialist shops. We also need to convert High St properties to homes and turn the high streets into vibrant areas.. Shopping centres out of town with transport links are the best place for large retailers.

    Just to come back to this post you made a few months ago Mike, but you think the demise of the high street is in part due to our boredom of the endless chain shops everywhere turning into town into a carbon copy of the next?

  • Customer service, accessibility, imagination, excessive car parking fees - all of these things and more come into it.

    I think that shops will undergo a radical overhaul. I saw an Amazon shop on TV the other week, where you just scan your Amazon app to a device at the front of the shop, but everything goes straight into your shopping bag and you just walk out of the shop when you’ve finished. The cameras log what you have taken, and what you’ve put back, and you then get an automated bill on your phone immediately.

    Such a system also very neatly prevents theft, so with fewer staff, no tills and no thieving, shops can suddenly make profits again.

    I don’t think town centres are completely dead just yet - hopefully the on-line companies like Amazon will lead the way.

Participate now!

Don’t have an account yet? Register yourself now and be a part of our community!