Two of the biggest names in retailing have appealed to Government to “level the playing field” and start to apply a different taxation to on-line retailers. The CEOs of Morrisons, Dalton Philips, and J. Sainsbury’s Justin King, should be told to stop whinging and get on with life! I don’t recall them having any problem moving out of town and inflicting pain onto the high street. Just because a format has a legitimately different cost structure doesn’t give competitors the right to call for Government help to compete.
The retail industry is in the middle of one of the most dramatic changes experienced in modern times. From the advent of the first self service Supermarket in St. Albans in 1947 through to the magnificence of the latest Big Malls in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds retailing has experienced many changes driven by a combination of factors. Sophisticated merchandising, marketing and logistics developments have all been developed to respond to the demand for convenient shopping. Successive generations of time poor people anxious to free up time to pursue other activities have flocked to the one stop shopping parks and centres with free car parking.
As a result property developers and retailers rushed into the 90s and 00s hungry to put down more and more space believing that the opportunities were endless. These convenient formats drew customers away from high streets in their droves resulting in forty thousand empty boarded up shops. However, following a false start at the end of the 90s with the dot com boom, on-line shopping is finally coming of age. It is now the turn of some of the very big retailers to feel the heat from on-line providers the biggest of them being Amazon. Out of town shopping parks may soon suffer the same fait which they dished out to their retail cousin the high street. The very high street remembered by many so fondly.
Slowly but surely the facts are beginning to percolate through a bed of misty-eyed sentiment and nostalgia. The high street and retailing in general is not going back to a credit-fuelled consumer boom of the early noughties and the dying model that traditionalists continue to champion remains in a critical condition. Put simply, the tide of change rolling through the retail sector is only going to get bigger.
Just look at the structural changes happening before our eyes. Applications for out of town retail developments are surging ahead of town centre developments, online shopping is booming and Amazon remains the most visited website for mobile retailers. On top of which, out of town mall culture continues to displace shoppers from traditional high street settings and a Google Glass revolution is gathering momentum.
Some of the early apps for Google Glass give a clear indication of how it’s likely to impact on shopping. One app, for example, lets wearers search for and buy items that match stuff they already own. You can buy a host of colour co-ordinated kitchen equipment just by staring at your shelves.
The disruptive effects of these changes are obvious. Retail will continue to migrate online and to out of town mega malls. To some this may sound a gloomy prognosis, but there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about our high streets. As the old way of doing things becomes redundant there’s the opportunity to build a post-retail landscape in town centres that embraces the needs of local communities above commerce. Retail will always have a role to play on the high street but if we’re going to bring back the buzz to tired shopping areas and give people a reason to go there, we need a different, community-led model.
First of all high streets will have to become meeting places once more, a locus of community power where education, leisure, health and housing meet local needs. Let’s convert empty shops into affordable homes, transform them into education hubs where literacy initiatives compete with new technologies and learning labs.
Where row after row of boarded up shops now stand let’s create leisure quarters so gyms, skateparks and velodromes coexist with dance studios, wellbeing centres and midnight football leagues. Streets where tumbleweed breezily blows through could just as readily be converted to health zones bringing dentistry, physios, dieticians, chiropractors, counsellors and different therapies together in one cluster.
Instead of ubiquitous payday loans, pound shops and pawnbrokers, we could start planning fresh food zones, large-scale epic crowd games, play zones, town centre allotments and continuous street theatre. All of this is achievable; it merely scratches the surface of what’s possible. But it’ll require an acceptance that the current model is bust, a willingness to plan and Government support to help nurture a new model.
So instead of calling upon Government to help big companies compete against on-line retailers please stand back Mssrs Philips and King and remember that change is something everyone has to respond to in order to stay on top! Encourage Government to look for ways to stimulate the economy through thriving, vibrant town centers and stop whinging.
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