Last month I visited the Scottish Borders and generally found this to be true, especially in Hawick, Galashiels, Kelso. I wasn't shocked however as I find the situation in Canada to be very similar (in the UK switch cannabis dispensaries for chippies). 25 years ago when a Wal-Mart came to the small town I grew up in, only took a couple of years to gut the high street, certainly Amazon threw fuel on that fire.
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?
The trick is to combine the two and deep fry your chips in THC oil.
I was thinking deep fried edibles.
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).
This is mostly good things for people to think about, but... "immigrants doing god knows what" just looks like racism dropped into an otherwise reasonable ramble. Hopefully that's not how you meant it.
It's the reality of most cities in northern Italy, e.g. the one my SO lives in: Reggio Emilia.
If you go out after 7 pm most of the year half the people downtown are immigrants selling drugs, doing petty crime or whistling and annoying women.
I see and live that, and have female family members and friends being assaulted by these people, and they are immigrants.
It's not a matter of skin color, but demographics.
They are young, male, unemployed and from a different culture, they are more prone to decaying and aggressive behavior. But it's a fact, they make the cities less safe and they dominate the stats in petty and violent crimes.
Unfortunately, the most powerful men in the world at this point are known to harass and assault women. That doesn't mean it's ok when the powerless do it, but you should be careful about attributing it to their demographics. It's something men need to address globally, not try to scapegoat immigrants for.
One of the only "facts" we know about crime is that it correlates very closely with poverty, which makes sense, since those who are doing well have more motivation to avoid disturbing the status quo.
When commercial rents aren't artificially inflated it allows for a greater diversity of businesses. There are tons of businesses that could exist if the government wasnt so intent on running a plantation economy.
I'm not sure what government has to do with it, it doesn't set the price of rents.
Rents do get progressively lower in distressed areas because they are distressed, and higher in high demand ones, but that's not enough when less customers are entering your shops anyway.
Government adds mountains of red tape, taxes employers to death and has reduced the spending power of the median worker to below poland through its plantation migration policy.
Commercial units sit empty instead of lowering rents because of the 'extend and pretend' in lending. The banks can't afford to revalue commercial real estate at the current market rate. It's like the 70s again.
What the hell are you talking about lol.
There's no design of anybody, red tape and taxes have always been there, but they are not a problem of many sectors, but commerce in particular in this period of time, and not just in Italy but globally.
You cannot have real estate as an investment (sometimes the only one without capital gains tax), and simultaneously people living around and hanging out. Investment real estate pushes permanent inhabitants out.
I always wondered about the nail / foot spa stores. What is it about these businesses that makes them such good defaults when nothing else seems to be able to survive?
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.
Cheap to patronize, low barrier to entry, and can’t be done over the internet.
Same in other European countries, usually the rumors are they take advantage of business sponsorship activities, or some kind of money laundry, taxes evasion.
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.
Incredibly low capex and opex so once you've got it running you can basically just throttle the business in accordance with demand.
Laundry.
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.
What does this mean? How do nail salons do that? Super curious.
Not sure exactly what the previous content was referring to, but many salons (not just nail salons) also sell some of the products that they use (or claim to use) or knock-offs thereof, sometimes "under the counter". I can't see this making enough to cover high street rents though, however good the kick-back is, but it can't hurt too have an extra revenue stream.
Same in the US, they are often fronts for prostitution and other organized crime. Here in the US (I live in a deindustrialized former industrial zone) the derelict downtowns are also full of bail bondsmen, payday loan sharks, DUI lawyers, dollar stores, as well as delicious cheap ethnic food (like the kebab shops in the UK).
>the derelict downtowns are also full of bail bondsmen, payday loan sharks, DUI lawyers, dollar stores, as well as delicious cheap ethnic food (like the kebab shops in the UK).
When a lake spontaneously disappears you can see all the trash on the bottom because it's no longer obscured by the water.
When economic prosperity disappears you're left with baseline services that involve people and the government, because all the other activity that was obscuring it is gone.
they're saying they're drug fronts / money laundering
The end of the article raises a point that makes me wonder: that perhaps cities have put the cart before the horse and that people didn't go to the city center but, rather, that the city center was the place where people hung out. And with third-places in life support people have no reason to go to the city center anymore.
There have been a number of suggestions in various threads that some high street shops are money laundering; for what it's worth, London Centric investigated and found that the likely crime was tax evasion, not money laundering: https://www.londoncentric.media/p/asf-aziz-london-candy-shop....
Remove the cars. Remove the parking. Make space for people and not cars.
That works if people live within walking distance of the high street. Do they? No, they don't.
And what will people do there? There's only so many restaurants and pubs a street can support.
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.
"just take a leisure 5-mile stroll every time you need something other than groceries, bro."
it never cease to baffle me to see the progressive cosmopolitan types being utterly detached from the reality they live in.
They are well past these simple mobility solutions. The reasons and economic, demographic, and geopolitical.
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.
Yeah, not sure why anyone that had ever visited the UK would think the problem with British high streets was an abundance of parking :)
That’s an insane amount of very cheap parking.
Parking is a massive blight on our cities (and suburbs and rural areas)
Its the parking. It's always been about the parking.
If I go to my local high streets I either cannot park at all (all residents only permits or disabled or taxis only or bus stops etc) or I have to pay eye watering fees - e.g. £1 or 2 per 15 minutes. Council parking wardens will be out prowling looking for infractions and giving you a £80 fine without any grace period.
...Or I just go to a shopping center like Brent Cross and park for free with zero hassle.
Yes I can walk or take the bus to the high street, but that will turn a quick 20 minute errands I to a 100-120 minute roundtrip, with the discomfort of doing it with shopping bags on the return journey (and the buss will cost you more than parking and fuel, while being slower, less convenient, and less pleasant)
For what it is worth, I don't feel like crime or drugs are a concern, at least not in my part of London.
In the US, city and town centers were first hit hard mid-20th century by the Interstate Highway System which enabled suburban sprawl and big-box retailers. Later came e-commerce. When something does take the place of a local shop or restaurant, it often ends up being a chain of some kind. Add the post-pandemic shift to hybrid work and you also see a huge increase of office space vacancies.
There's also the fact that property developers, commercial landlords, and institutional lenders frequently favor corporate tenants over independent operators. Rising property values and high commercial rents also price out local, independent owners.
However, there have been some exceptions under the New Urbanism banner where you see localized revivals. Some cities (like Jersey City) cap chain occupancy of retail space to 30%. Portland and Austin use zoning rules to make commercial real estate unattractive to chains. Commercial community land trusts can also be used to freeze rent and make space more affordable for local businesses. I doubt there's a one-size-fits-all approach.
Isn't it like that everywhere? And I suspect the recipe is pretty much the same:
Local business owners are taxed to death.
Meanwhile, multinationals with HQs in tax havens roll in and set up national branches. The local branches pay their HQs for imaginary "services" and "rights", allowing them to operate practically tax-free in the country.
Good luck staying open little guy. We're lucky we still have vape shops and nail parlours.
> 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
Amazon is a major culprit, but not the only one. Don't forget e.g. fast fashion brands. Or appliances brands. Or even restaurant chains.
And of course let's not forget COVID, which was a major factor in destroying small business of any kind.
Big players similar to Galeries Lafayette also fell victim but for different reasons. First (I think) they tend to be well-staffed, so their costs are much higher than e.g. Zara. And second, outsourcing of manufacturing has made a visit to Lafayette kind of pointless: If you are to choose between 50 shades of "made in China", you might as well do it from the comfort of your home.
Also supermarkets. The rot set in before the internet came along.
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.
0 value add retail was always going to evolve to a lower friction experience. Sears roebuck catalog disrupted retail in the 1800s.
It's both tbf. Shops generate less revenue than before but business rates are going up. The charity shops have low customer footfall but get a legitimate tax break (and let's just say the rumours that the vape and nail shops aren't the best at tax compliance probably aren't totally unfair...)
> Local business owners are taxed to death.
And the ones left aren’t paying taxes, or wages.
It's massive corruption at HMRC. You cannot explain it otherwise.
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.
Also bookies and barbers.
High streets in the UK are pretty dreadful. One saving grace is the proliferation of excellent kebab shops. Affordable, delicious and fast (not that kind) food. I wish we had more options like that in the US.
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.
That's called shwarma and it's some of the most delicious meat known to man. Fun fact, tacos al pastor (possibly the best food of all time) is based on shwarma which Lebanese immigrants brought to Mexico:
quick anecdote:
I'm a Frenchman but I hold no particular dumb grudge against the English, I actually like them, their style, their music, what I perceive as their refinement as much as their capacity to be hilarious, quick with the banter, overall good lads
so a few years ago, I booked a trip to London, then a train to Northampton cause I wanted to see the city where all the good shoe manufacturers are based (I own a pair of Crockett and Jones and enjoy other brands like Cheaney, Trickers, etc).
what a BRUTAL wake up call, what was on paper a thriving manufacturing town with rich history turned out to be a completely derelict place, with boarded windows in the main streets, beggars, dollar shops, litter absolutely everywhere and the signs that the golden age of the town is LONG gone. I don't know what happened there, recession, Brexit, I really don't know but I ended up taking the train back to London earlier than anticipated, completely shocked by what I saw
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).
for me English people are a mix
it's the drunken brutes, the burping, clanic, air max 95-wearing savages, but it's also a culture where entire musical genres emerge, the country of Richard "Aphex Twin" James and Boards of Canada, the appreciation for gardens, the relentless success of great authors and directors
Boards of Canada are Scots, but let's say "UK" and not "English"
slightly different mix and I don't want to mistake one from another (total faux pas) but for me as an outsider, there's less of a difference
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.
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.
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.
What was your impression of London ?
London is beautiful, I really want to go back and spend more time there (I want to visit Kew ASAP for example), but I felt two things very strongly:
- it's extremely diverse, in a way that no other big metropolitan cities I've visited really are (and way more varied and diverse than Paris). You feel that variety crossing a street, where you go from "oh what a nice place with great heritage buildings and all" to "oh I should keep my eyes open, sketchiness has increased dramatically in the past second"
- London during the day and London at night are basically two different ecosystems, love it during the day, not for me at night (too rowdy / wild)
What on earth is "charity shopping"?! I see it a lot on social media and dating apps.
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.
Aka "Op shop" for the Aussies & Kiwis.
I'm European, so it's a second hand like Dutch Kringloop?
Yes, Kringloop, Charity Shop, Sally Ann (Salvation Army) in the US, all similar things.
Second hand, usually donated goods, sold to fund a charity.
Are there no similar stores in the US?
They call them thrift stores. Goodwill is a huge chain that you can find everywhere.
Shops run by charities (similar to US 501.c.3 'nonprofits'), which are exempt from certain business taxes.
Charity shops are great, actually. I wish more countries had them as commonly as the UK does.
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?
UK Charities collect unwanted used/unused products from people and sell to fund their operations. Product ranges from small toys, books, tableware, clothing, used electronics to furnitures. Sometimes you found good new stuff too.
Essentially just a thrift shop run by a charity, with proceeds going to their stated goal. In the UK it's generally Oxfam, Cancer Research UK or the BHF (British Heart Foundation)
Others have mentioned in a separate thread, but it is a thrift shop operated by a charity.
Thrift store. Like Goodwill.
Hey how else are you going to launder dirty money.
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.
Another variant I see are mobile phone case shops in super expensive rental locations selling 5-10 euro cases. Sure......
Or American sweet shops. I doubt it’s a big enough market to justify the number of them in my nearest city.
Ah, you know Oxford street.
Could you pick me up an AI generated "I Love UK" tote bag if you're heading that way.
They are selling whatever you want to buy.
I've seen shops in London that don't even bother having any products on display. Just many blokes and a till.
also candy stores, bubble tea...
I find nicotine vaping really pleasurable. It's all about finding the right device and flavor though. I'm rocking the XROS Pro 2 right now but I also have a box mod with a mesh coil that I sometimes use as well. I'm not against vape shops as long as they aren't selling disposables.
So you’re ok that high streets are just peddling to your own addiction?
That city is notorious
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...