It comes down to money and the cost of living. Landlords are extracting rent, no room for entrepreneurship.
A race to the bottom, but I wouldn’t blame Amazon. Large multinational chains were hollowing out high streets and making them less pleasant before online shopping.
As another comment said, councils and government should treat high streets more like public commons, prioritising independent businesses and making places distinctive.
What frustrates me is that even prosperous areas with new developments rarely make space for small businesses. Instead, we get “private equity” chain.
Ugh, one I saw recently was Bristol University’s new campus by Temple Meads. The wall between the campus and station could have been lined with small, affordable units for independent and student-run businesses. Would love to browse a few interesting shops or grab a decent sandwich before catching a late train. 23m for a new entrance but where are the opportunities. (This is based off the media announcements, not walked through there yet)
They sell fairly space-efficient, expensive products or services. Generally speaking, the higher you push rent per square foot, the fewer types of businesses you can operate, because people and products take up space and have throughput limits. Nail and beauty services can get spendy fast.
The US has something similar going on with medical and dental offices for the same reasons.
Outgoings are different - cheap/dodgy imports, and modern slavery (nail salons are infamous for this) mean that their outgoings can be much lower than other shops. There’s also the tax avoidance many of these businesses partake in, both in the traditional cash-in-hand-business fashion, and the more modern(?) “American Candy store” way (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61777445)
(Yes, at the M&Ms shop in Leicester Square. Probably never visited by anyone from London, just tourists.)
But the "American Candy Shop" places were/are doing money laundering and/or tax fraud. They can say they sold individual candies for £0.50 (cost: 5p each), the profit goes to a shell company in the Virgin Islands etc, and before the business taxes are due the company "goes bust" and disappears. Then a new one takes its place.
In fact that's exactly what large enforcement operations against these do, the problem is that they just close down, the person who they were registered to disappears(if they ever existed at all) and another shop opens in the same place registered to someone else. It's a game of whack a mole.
It's just stupid that councils have no problem arguing that say, Clarkson(sorry, stupid example) can't open a pub in a town with no other pub or other employment opportunities, but 17th vape shop on the same street is fair game and free market.
Pubs are regulated by a limited amount of alcohol licenses, which goes back centuries. Do you really want there to be licenses for other industries as well?
> Do you really want there to be licenses for other industries as well?
Yes. I'm surprised that business licenses aren't already a thing.
I expect a competent government to issue licenses to barbers based off them proving hygiene standards, trained staff with college diplomas in hair-dressing, number of employees, and an extremely limited number of these to be issued based off local need calculated from population by census.
I expect local government to issue similar licenses for all other industries, who should prove their competency, adherence to standards, jobs created, and cater to local needs.
Vape shops sell addictive products and they have minimal overhead. I think the markup on a lot of what they sell, especially the more grey market stuff like nitrous oxide "whip cream chargers" and poppers, is quite high.
A lot that I see have extremely cheap-looking fixtures and little to no decor, and unlike virtually any other store, they stock what they stock, which is generally the same as every other vape shop, and don't even bother to fill out the entire space if it would hold more merchandise.
I assume some are able to negotiate lower rents in exchange for short term leases while the store is technically still on the market for a long-term lease, similar to a pop up store. A lot that I've seen could be shut down, with all the merchandise and equipment loaded into a UHaul, within a few hours if necessary.
Nail salons are similar. They really should have custom ventilation systems since they're working with paints and solvents and glues and nail drills/lathes, but this seems to not be enforced since they're seen as girly little spas rather than industrial workshops and are often staffed by poor immigrants.
They sell something that doesn't work so well online or at a supermarket. Ditto barbers, phone repair, or whatever racially-coded tabloid bugbear de jour. They work in a town centre, everything else can't beat the prices set by larger (often American-owned) businesses.
You can buy a vape online, but as a smoker, you don't want to wait a day when you've run out. Also as a smoker, I don't get why they're not regulated like tobacco. They shouldn't be sold alongside sweets, and should otherwise be treated like cigs (e.g. on packaging, licensing, advertising etc.). Seems very low-hanging legislative fruit.
They can’t. They tend to turn over like the rest. But as others noted, their low upstart costs makes them the more likely tenant out of other busines models on the sidelines seeking rent.
We all want little cutsey shops and such but how much money for that is actually sitting on the sidelines at any given time ready to pounce? Hardly any at all, if any. Nail shops and other bullshit on the other hand? There’s private equity specialized in selling shares of these schemes.
San Francisco forbids formula stores in many places. Okay, so we don't have a Chipotle and a Nordstrom Rack on Valencia St, but then a burrito on it costs $24.
okay but why? cost of living is less in america's burbs too. you are getting cause and effect reversed: the huge chain stores and PE firms, they are very efficient, i mean that's why they grow so big, and being efficient is strongly associated with lower prices.
In stuff like restaurants though it translates to increased margin not lower prices. Mom and pop restaurant margin is like a few percentage points if you are successful. Some franchises sniff 10 even 25% for say a chic fil a.
> councils and government should treat high streets more like public commons, prioritising independent businesses and making places distinctive.
You're advocating central planning.
The real problem is that it's very hard to build stuff in the UK. This is a choice that the people have made and the status quo still continue until they choose differently.
Central planning is the status quo. That's essentially what zoning rules are, and why everything is such a mess. You want to open a shop and live above it? No, sorry, not zoned for residential; banned. Operate the shop out of your house instead? Haha, banned. What if your shop really doesn't need very much space at all, so something the size of a closet would do as long as it's in the right location? Nope, minimum unit sizes or similar, prohibited by law. And so on.
If they want to stop doing this that would be great, but if they're not going to stop doing it then having the rules be things like "no chains" instead of "no small units" would certainly be an improvement.
Planning is such a strange thing. "You're not allowed to build homes unless you also build a creche (daycare)" - OK... but I'm a company that builds homes, I don't know anything about running a creche "well then nobody gets to have a home unless you pay up buddy"
It's not out of the realm of possibility for a real estate development company to partner with someone who runs daycares, surely? I'm sure the company that builds the homes already partner with a lot of different companies for specialized tasks?
Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default.
They can, and my statement is a bit of a caricature (it's not like I expect the person pouring concrete to be mixing baby formula a year later) but it seems like "but amenities!" is mostly a way to make sure any new arrivals have to pay for things for existing local residents. Development charges are similar.
Land and real estate is not unlimited especially in urban areas. Building companies optimize for profit so they don't have a good incentive to build out public necessities. It will be always a bit of squaring a circle if you want half sensible area development.
Building companies optimize for profit which is why they have a good incentive to build things that are in short supply. They build whatever the customer buys.
On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.
The requirements are nothing but a type of tax whose revenue is allocated to some de facto government program. But taxes on new development are asinine because they inherently get passed on as higher rents for humans and businesses, and the latter then have to pass them on as higher prices -- or can't afford them and go out of business, which is how you get the high street full of vape shops.
> On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.
That does not seem true. Most (though certainly not all) daycares I see in Europe have buildings that have a layout similar to a school with outdoor areas. A daycare doesn’t need a window front but needs a sandpit.
If maximising profit were actually allowed we’d have far more homes. The current rules make sure builders are -not- allowed to build as many homes as needed.
> Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default
I feel like the absurdity is the other way.
Consider the two components of a public daycare: Who runs it and who pays for it.
With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.
With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids. Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?
The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves. Whereas if the parent can do higher skilled work then they can still take the job and use the subsidy money to pay for daycare, even if they're not required to use it for that. So the better subsidy is the one in cash.
> With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids.
Here in Norway it's heavily subsidized. I don't know what the cost for the parents if it would've been if it weren't. But in this very high-cost country it costs about €200/month to have a child in daycare/kindergarten (ages 1-5, usually run separated in age groups 1-2 and 3-5). Second child simultaneously is cheaper. Third is cheaper still.
> Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?
I'm pretty sure that would leave us with extremely variable coverage for those who do choose kindergarten.
> With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.
I'm a free-marketeer. Yet I'm very much of the opinion that kindergartens are not suited for a "competitive market" (nor are e.g. hospitals). Although I am a free-marketeer, I also believe that these are services that should be available at quality to anyone independently of income. I'm very happy that my children are in kindergarten with children from families making half, and twice, of what my family makes.
> The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves.
How is this perverse? Do we not need people doing low-wage jobs? From your wording I feel almost sure you're American.
> But in this very high-cost country it costs about €200/month to have a child in daycare/kindergarten (ages 1-5, usually run separated in age groups 1-2 and 3-5). Second child simultaneously is cheaper. Third is cheaper still.
Because they're subsidizing the rest of the cost. But that's the issue. If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money? Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare. Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.
> I'm pretty sure that would leave us with extremely variable coverage for those who do choose kindergarten.
It would have a similar effect to having an economy that allowed more families to be sustainable on a single income rather than two. Then fewer of them would need daycare and there might be fewer daycares, but that doesn't seem like a great reason to force more kids into daycare, especially when the consequence would plausibly be something like the nearest one to you is 14 km away instead of 10 km.
> Although I am a free-marketeer, I also believe that these are services that should be available at quality to anyone independently of income.
But now you're talking about the price again.
Suppose the actual unsubsidized cost for providing quality service is X. If you provide a daycare subsidy for each child in the amount of X, it costs the government X, and then everyone can afford daycare. If you instead provide a cash subsidy for each child the amount of X, it costs the government X, and still everyone can afford daycare, because paying for it costs X and they received X in cash to use for that or anything else at their choosing.
> How is this perverse? Do we not need people doing low-wage jobs?
It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.
And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.
> Because they're subsidizing the rest of the cost.
I know. I used the price as an example to indicate how heavily subsidized it must be.
> If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?
Because the market for daycare will favor the well-off. You're just topping off the income of people who need daycare, then leaving everyone to fend for themselves. That's often OK. I think there are some sectors where it's not. Kindergartens being one. This is, for both of us, of course just opinions.
> Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare.
And if you hand off more cash, you get better daycare. And less cash, worse daycare. I'm totally fine with that logic for TVs and cars, not so much with our children. Even from a purely capitalist perspective: a major force in capitalism is rewarding and thereby incentivizing useful behavior – what behavior of the children are we incentivizing (resp. disincentivizing) by sending them to a good (resp. bad) kindergarten? It's absurd.
> Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.
And now you've taken a person out of the labor force. Possibly forever. Granted, there are some big open questions about the labor force going forward, but looking back decades it's been clear that that's a bad thing in western societies.
> It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.
None of this makes much sense in most cases. In my municipality, kindergarten employees are responsible for roughly 5 small children or 8 big children at any given time. There are no full-time jobs in this country that pay a fifth of a kindergarten employee's salary (yes yes, there are overheads etc).
But yes, I can see the math maybe working out if you have 4 children under the age of six and are working as e.g. a cleaner. Maybe. I think that's a very small segment of society. And you know, I'd much rather still send those kids to kindergarten, have them play with the children of millionaires and children like themselves all day, while the parent retrains for a job they'd rather do.
The person having so many children on such a low income is probably also living in very confined space. I'm sure those kids love the change of scenery!
> And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.
I agree that useful jobs should be well-paying enough that recruiting people into them doesn't require applying extra societal pressure. Of course.
> If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?
They did, for many years. It was a flagship policy of the Christian Democratic party. Labour and the left didn't like it because it was seen as keeping women dependent and out of the labour force (I think something like 90% of the time, it was the woman who took advantage of the subsidy). The far right didn't like it, because it was very often the wrong kind of woman who chose to stay at home with their 2 year old. So it was steadily reduced until I think it was removed entirely.
It should also be said that a lot of parents who took the stay at home subsidy didn't actually stay at home, but hired a nanny instead of sending their children to kindergarten. That got disapproval even from the traditionalists.
It's not strange at all, without zoning you get shops (and buildings) which extract all the shared value of a community and give nothing back.
I live in a tourist town in Norway. There are some nice shops. A nice cafe run by some Italians, a coffee place which started out as a church initiative (then got kicked out from their original locale when it turned out they were much, much better at selling good coffee than evangelizing) which has awesome concerts and an art gallery, to name two of my favorites.
There are also tourist tat shops. Dozens of them. One prominent one at the entrance to the main shop with a blinged-out AI generated moose. Oh, and casinos - I mean bingo places. They just extract money. The owners don't live here, so they don't care. They're parasitic, they might well go broke without the few positive externality shops around them - but they make more money than those decent shops. And landlords set the rent accordingly.
Of course there's one place where they do central planning, where they realize that externalities are crucial in retail and charge rent accordingly, and where there's not a single tourist tat shop. That place is the mall.
> It's not strange at all, without zoning you get shops (and buildings) which extract all the shared value of a community and give nothing back.
I don't see that in Japan, which is very liberal in zoning. Taiwan is less liberal but doesn't pick which shops. Both are wonderful countries with vibrant, dynamic cities. We have friends in both places, and family in the latter, and life is quite pleasant.
I get that if building homes somehow created more people. What we have now is people living in cars, people and their kids living in 1 room apartments, etc. and we're telling them "it is better for you to live in horrible conditions than it is for us to build new homes because we won't have all the amenities (half the time this is just code for 'parking') built by the developer"
So a child living in the middle of nowhere gets to never see their parent because that parent spend 4 hours a day commuting, because building flats in the city isn't allowed. Where is that kid going to daycare now?
Huh? I don't get what this has to do with what I wrote. That sounds like it is about residential zoning requirements. You can build flats here, and especially you can section your old buildings into umpteen tiny apartments. You can't tear down the architecture that makes this town a tourist destination, but that's about it.
(Actually you can do that to, if you just buy it up and let it fall into disrepair, argue it has no value now and tear down everything but the facades. That's how we got the aforementioned mall)
Because without planning there would be only houses and no daycare. Apartment complexes are the most profitable type of building (everybody needs an apartment to live), at least in my country, and daycares and schools are other infrastructure are not profitable and not worth investing if investor had a choice. They are a burden. So they make investor have no choice and carry a burden.
But if you don't do that, what you end up with is housing projects - "villages", they're often called in the marketing brochure, built on greenfield sites with no access to amenities except by car. They're expensive, built to really crappy standards, and there's kind of nothing for anyone to do except stare at their huge flat-screen TV mounted too high on their grey-on-grey living room wall.
Zoning in the American sense doesn't exist in the UK, outside of Local Development Orders and (maybe, if you squint a bit) the system of Brownfield Land Registers.
Outside those very limited exceptions, planning in the UK is done on a discretionary basis, and both the discretionary system and the LDOs are overseen by Local Planning Authorities made up of elected local councillors.
There's no central planning authority, and the system is designed to be flexible at the cost of providing less certainty to developers. Mixed use developments are the norm here, and most new residential blocks will have some form of commercial or social space on the ground floor.
Central planning is making the rent too high. The UK isn’t rich enough for stuff to be expensive because of extremely high demand. Its expensive because it’s too hard to build stuff.
The UK wouldn’t accept the pain necessary to start making things again just like we were never going to accept the changes needed to make Brexit a success.
Maybe some amount of central planning wouldn't be bad? Maybe when it's broad strokes designations of public space usage and not how many toilet paper rolls one gets it can be a net benefit?
For what it’s worth I had the same thought as the ancestor post. Town squares are as privatization friendly as water, electricity, and oxygen. We just took it for granted that they were self sustaining as a public amenity and are now suffering because rich people bought up everything and are renting it back to us at half the quality and twice the price.
There is already central planning, it's just done between the state and corporations, which also includes landlords. They're advocating for a result that would be accomplished by corporations playing less of a role and local residents and workers playing a greater role in the planning.
See the Astley (Wigan) Warehouses and SIP car parks for two prime examples.
I rent a workspace outside of my home, I'm paying less than 150 quid for a room in a light industrial zone. Gives me space for my fun stuff as well as work. I love having my own space, and it's very affordable.
I was just looking at the prices for city centre commercial rental in my nearest town. Huge spaces available, it's generally more per month, and I'd be worried about the rates threshold, but at a lower price point we'd be in business.
I think there's something to that. More people using a centre for work would create more opportunities in towns.
Again, I think the challenge the UK has is the gross differential between incomes and the cost of buying or renting property. Unsustainable, and very much part of these morbid symptoms.
That is a very valid point. However, I suspect that some of the businesses that managed to survive transitioned into operations that function solely as fulfillment centers for dispatching packages.
The issue with that approach is that it results in numerous vacant spaces, which fail to attract enough foot traffic to be appealing to other businesses.
There was a struggling shopping mall near my home. Many retailers left the premises after one of the big stores shut down.
Recently some other big brand occupied the space, in a couple of months besides it there is a Samsung store and an apple store. Now all spaces are busy and they stay busy all week long.
This makes me suspect that we highly optimised for the "2010s" online era without considering the side effects.
Don't forget the brutal taxes in the UK in relation to the current economic circumstances.
The UK economy has faltered and not had a chance to recover since 2008. The more recent improvements really because of a reproachment of Brexit and global concerns around the US are welcome but not necessarily structural improvements in the UK.
It's no coincidence that the businesses that can easily evade tax and usually also sell illegal goods are the ones that dominate the high street.
Commercial property on our high streets is owned, in the main, by foreign investment firms that treat it as an asset.
In many cases you can’t find out who the owner is. There’s too many shell companies involved.
These firms don’t care about occupancy, they care about the resale book value.
Business tax rates are based on those property valuations.
There’s no chance the property companies will reduce the value of their portfolio to reduce burden for tenants they don’t care about.
Then you have foreign online retailers like Amazon and Temu able to use complex multinational tax avoidance schemes and fake products to undercut the high street.
How can you compete if Amazon can deliver a knock off from China, that you can’t legally sell, faster than you can stock a real one into the shop, and at half the price?
I agree. Every pound spent locally massively benefits society.
If good shops are available people will use them, if they provide what they're looking for.
I think we need the government to look at how retail works and what shoppers actually want.
There's not much local shops can do about the long tail, they can't stock everything. At the very least need to stop penalising them financially and allowing online retailers to compete on tax avoidance.
My father is old and naive. He was tricked into ordering fake "Yorkshire" tea bags from Temu. Fake tea bags for gods sake. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.
We have no control on the quality coming from these sites. We can't even guarantee items are not made using slavery. Both Temu and Chien executives refused to reveal that in parliamentary investigations.
Stuff like that has to stop, standards needs to be universally applied or the bad will drive out the good.
From a systems dynamics point of view this is unstable as defectors still enjoy the benefits of nice enviroments while paying non of the costs (e.g. go window shop and try things on for size, then by the stuff from a low cost dropshipper).
So unless your "convicing" is a serious eufimism for fairy drastic emforcement, the plan is doomed.
If your neighbor is a defector (a game theoretically optimal name for "an asshole") there's nothing to do but turn the other way and talk to your neighbor over the other fence.
A lot of what he said about the root causes of why UK high streets were dying seems to have been accurate, and this is before the double whammy of the Covid pandemic and the increase in interest rates to tackle inflation (as well as the mini-budget crisis of 2022), plus energy prices for shops and pubs in the UK are really high.
Retail parks are so popular in the UK because being able to visit a couple of stores in the park and do your shopping in one hit, plus the cheap/free parking, and that is ultimately what UK shoppers want - convenience.
If councils want to rescue their high streets, they may have to get more creative when it comes to getting new stores to open, beyond just offering a respite on business rates.
Mentions the druggies in passing twice (once in a quote) and an astronomical crime level (160 per 1000 people? So I have a 16% chance of being a victim??) but zero mention of either at the end of the article in terms of fixing the issue.
Zero info on who the government hundreds of millions is going towards to help the problem (let me guess: a bunch of nonprofits who won't solve the problem).
> and an astronomical crime level (160 per 1000 people? So I have a 16% chance of being a victim??)
Not even close, unless you own a shop (in which case, in some areas, life can undeniably be exasperating and miserable). The vast majority of high street crimes are shoplifting or possession (or drinking in alcohol control areas) and an astonishingly large number are attributed to a tiny, tiny number of people.
There are high crime areas in most towns in the UK where you will feel pretty safe, because the crime is simply not directed at you.
When it does spill over into personal violence, it is the aforementioned handful of people with drug problems. It’s worth noting that one incident involving three people is likely to result in a dozen recorded crimes. And a British town of sixty thousand people will have so few of these prolific individuals that they themselves commute to neighbouring towns to steal.
Worth remembering also if you are an American that in the UK we have not decriminalised marijuana, so there are drug possession and small-scale dealing crimes in there too.
I would kindly disagree. In my rather "posh" and "good neighborhood " little village I've had 3 house robberies (well, one robbery and 2 attempts) in the span of 14 months, and I have myself witnessed two shop robberies as I was in Sainsburys for milk and eggs.
The crime is there, can be absolutely overwhelming and police does absolute f*k all about it (after the robbery they didn't even bothered to shop up, I was told over by phone to collect the evidence myself and bring it to the police because "we are solving these crimes from the office" by the investigating officer. They didn't solve that one).
Posh might be part of the issue. In my area seems like most home robberies are in wealthy neighborhoods, where no ones home and there might be nice jewelry to steal instead of my sad ancient tv.
It’s not, particularly, without unjust laws like three strikes.
For one thing, it’s a revolving cast of a few dozen people at any one time (people do go to prison, get rehabilitated, move on or get moved on). For another, they are often vulnerable or exploited: a lot of shoplifting is done to order, to supply the black market.
The UK does need to take shoplifting more seriously, but it’s important to understand that it is a consequence of both the design of retail (self-checkout and fewer staff) and of the cost of living.
Three strikes, in particular, is inherently unjust. There's no serious argument that it is not.
Silly fake faux-old-testament solutions like this don't actually work, as is demonstrated by the fact that most crime has fallen faster since they were abandoned.
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....
Yeah they’re crazy. Big space very nice. Two staff. Heated space (with open door).
…we were the only customer there. There is no way in hell there isn’t something dodgy afoot. Would be surprised if they have 50 bucks of legitimate revenue a day
UK high streets have been in some kind of decline (IMO) for decades now. Long before online shopping, COVID and its repercussions, and the current wave of street crime (phones, watches) and front businesses (vape and phone repair shops hiring dozens of "skilled" workers on visas... to work in a tiny cupboard unit with implausible turnover). Even when a new "luxury" apartment block is constructed, the retail units often remain vacant for years before being occupied by a constantly changing list of tenants, none of which seem to be able to make a success of it. The nursery becomes a dojo, which becomes a social enterprise cafe, which eventually becomes an estate agent, which then closes.
Rents are high, parking difficult, the products undifferentiated (carbon copy list of the same 15-20 chain franchises), not unique. After all of that, I'll assume prices are no better and may be worse than online retail.
I'm not sure what the answer is, as retail is not my area of expertise. However I think that if there is a solution it will have something to do with people, community, and offering a specifically local experience. Not one which is purely a chore, and I think it will involve much more than just "convenience".
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 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).
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.
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 are right that the units sit empty because the banks have loan covenants with the landlords that minimum rent is XX, which is higher than the unit is currently worth.
It isn't so much extend and pretend, its landlord CANT lower the rent without violating their loan.
If you get government involved, this will just get more expensive. We need to wait it out until the landlord can't pay the loan anyway and is forced to sell the building at a massive loss. Then the new owner will have a new loan with a new price floor and the dance can start over.
> It isn't so much extend and pretend, its landlord CANT lower the rent without violating their loan.
IANAPropertyGuy, but IIRC the banks don't really want to foreclose on it anyway, because that means recognizing that they made losing loans and they don't want to have to figure out what to do with the building that can't be sold off for much.
Hence strategically looking the other way when landlords off "first X months free" deals in lieu of an officially-lower rent.
This is exactly the case. On my Canadian high street the redevelopments are either empty or exclusively high cost businesses. I looked at the rent arrears notice posted on one failed shop and the rate would exclude anything not a money mill. They'll be no lutiers or second hand bookstores in the shiny towers on my street.
What if you had a rental agreement where you pay $x for y% of the property but the landlord lets you use the whole thing and x/(y*0.01) > minimum rent?
Or you pay minimum rent but your landlord gives you some of it back?
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.
Investment real estate has traditionally been a way for individuals and small landlords to build wealth over time. More recently, governments have decided that they want to add tons and tons of regulations to rentals, making it impossible for small landlords to continue to make a profit. Hence, they sell to big landlords who are impossible for tenants to deal with.
Do you understand where that "built wealth" comes from? It doesn't appear from the ether - it's transferred from one person to another. In this case, it's transferred from a legitimate useful business to a rent-seeking investor who creates no value but holds value hostage. And if the amount of "built wealth" is too high, no business exists that can afford to pay it, and so it doesn't get "built".
Traditionaly as in since what post redlining ban downzoning in the 1960s? No peasant was expecting their hovel to be an investment vehicle where they’d replace the doorknobs with cheaper furnishings and 10x their investment and somehow their peasant kids working peasant jobs would afford that.
I mean isn’t the whole rub the cost of housing is outpacing wages? Goes to show how short our historical perspective really is.
> No peasant was expecting their hovel to be an investment vehicle
It is not:) There had been a fortunate coincidence of factors such as economy, job market, demography, immigration from EU countries which all enabled it. That's all over now, it's gone.
What happens when all rent is extracted? We're about to find out.
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.
The original use of quotation marks in English, before scare quotes came along, was to suggest that the words you're using came from someone else. Fun fact: that's actually why they're called quotation marks.
That's what's going on here. @passive is repeating the word "fact" from the parent comment.
Because in a large number of cases, people are conflating economic situation with culture or race. And many of these so-called cultural or racial components disappear in the "home" country when you look at people in the middle class and above. Just like violent crime rates drop massively for those same races and cultures in the country they have immigrated to when they gain economic independence.
It's quite possible that high levels of immigration of unskilled or otherwise unemployable people is a bad thing for a country that shouldn't be allowed. That is a very different thing than acting like the reason it is a bad idea is because of their culture or race.
Of course there is one, but what exactly is "immigrant culture"?
That is my problem with the whole thing, all just gets thrown into one bag "immigrants". The women assaulting islamist gets the same label as the homosexual atheist fleeing where they are in charge. (And never mind that the bible contains mostly the same bad passages as the quoran and I never done the numbers, but I assume if we count and plot "muslims killed by non non muslims vs "non muslims killed by muslims" - that number would not match the felt reality)
Why is it so hard to admit that there is a cultural (and, by extension, racial) component?
What does "by extension" mean? Culture is voluntary. You can (and should) walk away from a flawed culture. Race is an unsheddable fixed attribute.
Meanwhile, both culture and race see more variation within groups than they do between groups, making discrimination a losing proposition even aside from its inherent immorality.
>both culture and race see more variation within groups than they do between groups
Btw, the premise underlying this fact is a fallacy. It is the norm for population groups, even meaningfully differing ones, to have "more internal variation" than between groups.
There is more variation in height within sexes than between them, but despite this there is still a very (statistically and culturally) significant difference in average height between men and women.
It's even possible for two distributions to be completely separated by a given variable while still having more internal variance.
> 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.
What are some of the other "facts" "we" know about? Are you conveniently ignoring the Epstein class and all we've learned?
The most powerful men in the world do not loiter in city centres, which is what the commenter is referring to. It is a common phenomenon across Europe, readily observable, that groups of young men, commonly (but not exclusively) foreign, loiter in loose groups in town and city centres, where they appear to be doing... nothing.
I think the commenter has expanded further on what he or she thinks they ARE doing, I reserve judgement - but this phenomenon is apparent.
That is completely true and fascinates me. If you go to any city centre, train station, etc. in Europe, you will find lots of black people just... doing nothing. They are just there, sitting, perhaps alone, perhaps many of them. They aren't even talking or doing anything, they just stare into the distance. They are part of the scenery. I have no idea what this means, who brought them here, what they actually do (if anything), and who's going to take them away (and when).
>One of the only "facts" we know about crime is that it correlates very closely with poverty
Yes, but be careful about implying that the dominant causation is poverty -> crime. Crime is the best cause of poverty because it makes doing business impossible and forces every actor to make every aspect of their life more and more inefficient in order to protect what they already have. Places like, say, Singapore are case studies in how a crackdown on law and order is all it takes to make a place go from very poor to extremely wealthy in a generation or so.
Yeah, we remember. And thanks to the attitude displayed in your comment, these complaints were not taken seriously. until these specific Italians ended up with control of massive illegitimate industries, gambling, and loan sharking, ran protection rackets that victimised and intimidated thousands of legitimate small businesses, and murdered hundreds of innocents.
There was always the option to just not let them in in the first place. Many people at the time (HP Lovecraft being an example) thought that Ellis-Island migration into the United States was an existential mistake.
..and in the case of some of those Italians, they were absolutely right.
High-trust Anglo civilization is not compatible with the attitude towards civil authority common in the 19th-century Mezzogiorno. It took literal generations to fix.
>In the average European mediterranean city shops provide lights, vibe, safety.
It's incredible how much of what we consider safety ultimately boils down to totally arbitrary vibes. There are tons of cities in the mediterranean that are way more dangerous than the worst parts of the uk, but because Italy has better PR (and isn't the target of right-wing hysteria), nobody cares.
People respond to what's happening locally. There's no question UK towns have been getting more lawless and dangerous than they were, say, twenty years ago. It may not be very bad in absolute terms, but that's not the criteria people use for comparison.
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.
To add to the headline I would say hairdressers/barbers and bad takeaways could also be added to the list.
What shops would you suggest could be added? Most people are buying larger items and clothes online or in chain retail park stores.
My small town has multiples of all of these but also many nice cafes/bars/restaurants and a butchers, bakers, a small market and fruit and veg, a couple of diy/hobby shops as well as 3 supermarkets, a library etc. There are even a couple of clothes stores and some pound shop type places.
I can't really see much of a change coming here or how it could be much better. Our 2 nearest city centres have a bit more variety but of course are mainly chain stores. People go out for an experience rather than shopping and this had already started well before covid hit.
EDIT: Interesting they chose Rotherham as an example, of course if they'd chosen Harrogate, Oxford, Durham, Bath etc the story would have been quite a bit different...
Yes, there's specific nuances to Rotherham that I think it underplays. Severe and worsening deprivation since industry closed down in the 80s, and it's turning slowly in to a satellite area of Sheffield. Infact, Sheffield put a lot of energy in the 90s and 00s in to blocking major reconstruction efforts, there's a reason the IKEA ended up not being built in Rotherham (where it would have been much cheaper).
Also, right behind where that header photo was taken, is a GOOD example of attempts to regenerate the high street.
But the causes are much longer reaching than anything this points to – it's been in decline in Rotherham since probably the 1970s.
Free parking, turn the centre into a relaxing space/park, with kids' playground.
Add coffee shops and restaurants nearby, help promote casual entertainment venues like mini golf, community theatre, and weekend markets.
Grow from there based on the type of demand that appears, keep business rates low for the area.
They say it can't be done, but when that last shop closes right now there will be no choice.
To combat the dereliction and anti social behaviour they would have to rebuild anyway, and it will cost them more later than gradual repurpose/ investment.
This is it, and I have heard politicians talk about these same ideas for years in my area. Alas, it looks like it's easier said and done, because the downward spiral is still ongoing.
And one of the reasons is definitely that out of your list, city planners have very different ideas about the first point, free parking. They want the opposite: ideally, no cars in the city at all. So, parking fees have been raising to exorbitant ranges as they want to incentivize people to take public transport instead. Except that people instead turn to internet shopping.
I'd replace the free parking with great public transport and cycling infrastructure. The parking spaces can be in the surrounding area, with frequent public transport between them and the centre.
Look at European cities that have implemented this even in part, and tell me it isn't much nicer with fewer cars. Shopkeepers are usually opposed to it before, but see that the improvement in atmosphere attracts more customers than are lost through the lack of parking spaces.
It’s not uncommon to see the car debate come up in threads like these. As someone who lived in central London for over a decade without a car and recently moved out where not having a car is incredibly inconvenient, I’ve experienced both realities.
Only yesterday, I drove into London and walked nearly 20k steps to visit the various locations on my itinerary. Not every inch of a space need be a road, but banning cars and insisting everyone walk or use public transport also isn’t the answer. We need roads adjacent to large, pedestrianised areas.
The specific problem with the UK is how London-centric and unreliable our transport infrastructure has become. Not to mention driving can be incredibly fun! Much more so than cycling when it’s pouring with rain, you’re going to a fancy event, or have a large amount to move.
I wouldn't say driving in the rain is fun, it's just slightly less bad than cycling maybe. I look around and don't see many people having fun in cars, it's mostly just anger, frustration and an inability to break the cycle. The only ones having fun are the fictional characters in the adverts. I think the sooner we stop pretending it's still fun and start treating it like the chore it is the better.
That's a thing I noticed in these discussions but also in real life developments: one party/group has strong opinions on what would work for them, probably even based on valid data, so they get elected/nominated and start implementing them - in complete ignorance of the valid data and opinions of the _other_ groups/parties. So they might reach (some of) their own goals while trampling the others' goals, so there's unhappiness and they get replaced with a new party/group which proceeds with the same losing approach just in another direction. Heck, nobody seems to be able _in_practice_ to join and overlap the expectations of the entire community and try (at least) to build a neighborhood for all its members. And it's frustrating.
With some exception e.g. London as you mentioned, councils have gone out of their way to make taking cars into town inconvenient, but put zero effort into making it easy to get there any other way. Result is that people prefer either out of town shopping centres with free parking or shopping online.
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.
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.
Loads of European cities and towns have developed extensive pedestrian-only zones. It doesn't necessarily bring life back after the Covid years. Many people today are going out less regardless of what nice amenities urban planners provide, and having food delivered appeals more to many young people than actually visiting an eatery.
My observation in europe is that pedestrian only areas in city center tend to be the most commercially successful areas in large cities.
In small towns maybe less because most people going shopping aren't from the town itsef but its surroundings so if they need to bring a car in the first place, they'd rather go where they can park it. And this is somehow a failure on how most european cities have tackled mobility itself. A lot of urban areas have been equipped with more or less secure bike paths, but they too often become impractical or plain dangerous outside in the larger area outside of the cities.
The confounding variable is the correlation with these pedestrianized areas with guarenteed foot traffic and hungry belly tourist traffic especially from more deeply pocketed people capable of international travel than locals.
These areas aren't only used by tourists. People genuinely like them. Tourists actually often make them less attractive and affordable because price go up and quality of services tend to go down.
Well no, but its a huge leg of the chair, those tourists with their disposable income fit for European vacation from half the world over, who are guaranteed to show up in this particular neighborhood for probably forever, vs the tesco on the outer ring road.
Funny hearing this about the UK where a major A road looks like some dusty forgotten american rural county route. You can complain about building for the car after you’ve ripped apart the middle of london for a 12 lane viaduct freeway with four level interchanges.
My partner works in planning and economic growth for a council and the level of local opposition to this especially from local businesses is enormous. But every time I go to a high street I look around and think "this would be nicer if it wasn't for this bloody road".
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?
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.
Same in other European countries, usually the rumors are they take advantage of business sponsorship activities, or some kind of money laundry, taxes evasion.
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.
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'.
IIRC in the UK specifically it's the biggest export industry. It's why the City of London (not to be confused with the city that is called London) won't ever be broken up.
I always think that they're fronts for money laundering. They're easy to set up and don't require lots of expensive equipment and they're probably mainly cash based (never visited one, so guessing here).
One thing that isn't brought up is that businesses like these are a third space, especially for women. They go there to hang out, chat, destress. So there's always going to be demand.
Nail salons have been opening right next to each other in my area, so I've been pondering this for awhile. It may just be a question of starting capital. You don't need much to start a nail salon. They don't have special furniture (the foot places do, but I'm just talking about the manicure places). They stock only a tiny amount of supplies. They don't need a web presence, or a lot of marketing in general. They don't require special equipment or stock nontrivial amounts of dangerous chemicals.
The biggest cost is labor, but labor money isn't something you need up front, since presumably at that point you have money coming in.
I realize everyone who's watched Breaking Bad thinks it's all about money laundering, but that's not as easy to do anymore, at least where I live, and the nail salons are proliferating.
In the US, someone involved in some kind of money laundering task force explained to me that a lot of those short lived stores are used to launder money and other money related operations. Lots of barbershops for example had the only same 5 people all day long talking smoking and occasionally getting cuts yet the store was making as much revenue as a high frequentation store...
Unfortunately it's a trend that is expanding worldwide, but
who wants to visit a city that offers the same of any other city? It's like plastic copies of the same product over and over again. Like an Andy Warhol piece.
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.
Hello! Progressive cosmopolitan type here to tell you that living in the city center and walking everywhere, whenever possible, is the best life I've ever had - well worth the premium I pay in order to enjoy it. You have no idea what you're missing.
hello! yes, that's exactly what I assume when I see walkable cities evangelism. I assume it's being evangelized by people who WFH or live near work, have a supermarket across the street, and get everything else delivered to their doorstep. I understand why cars may seem obsolete from their perspective, even a nuisance interfering with their 5-minute strolls to the coffee shop. but the overwhelming majority of us unfortunately lives in a vastly different reality.
Only because we have built our cities to prioritize car storage above all else. If we stopped building for cars and built for people instead things would change quicky.
And what does building for people look like, precisely? I live in a 1910s London housing estate with pretty ordinary single family sized homes with gardens and lots of green space. Cars were not really a big deal when they designed and built the place, pretty much everyone walked everywhere and had e.g. coal and milk etc delivered by horse. Its no slum and is generally seen as quite a desirable place to live even now and commands a premium.
Yet this is no utopia, despite being designed for people (...and horses!).
It takes 20 mins to get to the tube station or the area with the shops on foot (3 or 4 minutes driving - and these are small shops, not even big ones). Like what do you actually want it to have? A supermarket on every street corner? And a tube station and doctor's and a dentist and a cafe and a school and a cinema and a sports center and a museum and a library, on every corner? You can't have that density of things people want all within 5 or even 10 minutes walking unless you build some sort of ultra high-density high-rise city of the future where 10s of thousands of people live in a single 250-storey building (and then you end up "commuting" inside that buildings elevator system...).
Back in real life what you do have is a 5 minute walk to the bus stop where you wait for 5 to 10 minutes for the bus to come, then you sit on the bus for 10-30 minutes while it slowly slowly slowly goes some indirect route and then you get out and walk 5 to 10 minutes at the other end (assuming there is a single bus route that goes roughly where you need and you don't have to get off and wait again to change to another route to get to your final destination...). Then repeat the return journey carrying 15kg of groceries. Eventually, 2 hours later, you get back home.
Or just drive for 10 minutes to the shops and drive back. Which is what everyone does because people can't spend multiple extra hours a day just for getting around on foot and bus to buy food for the next few days (and you can only do a few days at a time as your are physically limited by what you can carry) or going to the doctors or getting the kids from school or whatever.
The tube is great but it's very very very limited in where it goes apart from the very center if London. Once you are outside zone 1 the gaps between stations and the "spokes" of the different lines becomes considerable.
How did people shop for groceries when your neighborhood was originally built? Surely it was not designed to be so inconvenient: what has changed in the meantime?
One popular way of talking about building for people is the concept of a "fifteen-minute city": neighborhoods where you can get to your daily needs within that much time via walking or biking. This does not require super-towers or any unusual level of density. My neighborhood - about ten years older than yours - comes close to the ideal, and while it has its share of apartment buildings, none are taller than half a dozen stories, and there are just as many people living in townhouses or single-family homes as there are in the apartments.
We don't have a metro station, but we do have an express bus line which will get you to a metro station in fifteen minutes, and that bus comes every five minutes. Not so bad.
No, there's not a shop on every corner - but there are two grocery stores within five minutes' walk, and two more within ten. No need to carry groceries on the bus at all.
Groceries might have been delivered. Also there were small food shops (butcher, grocer, fishmonger, baker) in every neighborhood that don't exist any more.
"15 Minute City" ideas sound nice on paper, but I think that in reality the research shows they are net-negative in basically everything apart from encouraging active-transport.
The main issue is around equity.
15 minute cities work great for high-paid knowledge workers with flexible schedules who can chose how and where they can work (i.e. laptop + wifi ... your typical HN reader perhaps). But this is not true for everyone - you cannot expect everyone to find employment within 15 minutes of their home (e.g. healthcare workers, factory workers, maintenance workers, security guards, farmers, construction workers etc etc are unlikely to e.g. find a factory within 15 mins of their house).
Making area support more active-transport (i.e. removing road space and replacing it with pedestrian and cycling space) also has the beneficial side-effect of making it nicer for people and thus more desirable. So property value and rents go up. And again, the high-paid knowledge workers and their families are fine, but the poorer and less well paid are priced out. The lower-income families have to move further out into lower-density areas where there is not enough density of population to support smaller grocery shops, pharmacies, etc so the 15 minute rule stops working and now they need to pay to run a car. And where you do retain roads for the essential transport needs (e.g. grocery deliveries, emergency services, garbage collection etc) you end up with the lower-income families living there since they are less desirable and cheaper and it is those who suffer from that the most (pollution, noise, safety etc)
If you remove roads of block access or removing parking etc to promote active-transport you also disproportionately impact those with accessibility problems. Not just "disabled people in wheelchairs" but also people who are not officially disabled but would benefit from driving, e.g. pregnant people, or elderly people who are fine but cannot walk distances regularly etc. 15 minute cities punish people who cannot easily walk or cycle unaided. Oh and ding ding ding yes these types people who have mobility issues also tend to be the poorer and lower-income people in society too.
Starting to notice a pattern here yet?
Basically the "15 Minute City" utopia is only for rich white-collar knowledge workers. It forces lower-income families and workers out of a neighborhood. I am undecided on if this is "working as intended" or not.
Which gaps? Unless you're outside zone six, you can get pretty much anywhere in London by tube or train within 20 minutes walking and if 20 minutes walking is too much for you then sure use the car, but traffic is so heavy in London that plenty of people just train.
Worth noting a 20 minute walk is a ~5 minute bike ride. I live a 20 minute walk from my local train station and when I can't ride a bike (which is rare, but happens for one reason or another) it's pretty annoying.
I don't know. I have been living in south of Spain for the last 7 years, buildings aren't high rises yet in the 2 neighborhood I have lived in I had most of the commodities available.
Right now I live in a residencial bmneighborhood, not a city center and I have in a 5 min walking distance general, groceries , 2 pharmacies, veterinary, vegetables, butcher, fast food (roasted chicken, burgers, kebab), stationery shop, physiotherapist, 2 small chinese "sell anything" shops (basically aliexpress at your door), a swimming pool + multisport area (soccer, paddle, basketball + others), several hairdresser and nail/beauty shop, a shop selling hicking goods, one selling mattresses, a car bodywork shop, a general mechanic car shop, a gambling joint, primary and secondary school and 2 english schools, some place with activities for older people, a park to walk the dogs and several playgrounds.
A 10min longer walk distance and I have 4 other groceries supermarkets, lots of other smaller shops/specialties. The closest cinema is a 10min ride in a bus or bicycle, city center ~20min. Closest airport is a 15min car ride.
I ride my bicycles 10 minutes and I am in the woods in a natural park where I can only hear birds.
It doesn't seem that hard to replicate. I am pretty sure the main issue in some places are some sort of zoning laws that prevent commercial areas to be rented in otherwise residencial neighborhoods.
That's close but not quite right. I understand exactly how necessary cars are for most people, having spent many years trapped in a car-dependent life myself, and I am so glad to have escaped from it that I want to do everything I can to liberate others. A walkable urban life should not be an expensive luxury - there is no fundamental economic reason for it. The scarcity is entirely a function of policy, primarily restrictive zoning codes, and we can fix that.
In Dublin, we periodically pedestrianise a street or two. And there is much angst about “oh, but the businesses”. And inevitably a year or so on the businesses on the street are busier than they ever were.
The US might be terminally carbrained but if you design infrastructure for walkability it is fantastic, much more convenient (parking is awful, carparks are awful), and cheaper.
The sell is downtown brooklyn and its a good sell and would be nice. Convenience, density, transit access, some of the best in the world.
The rub is nyc can’t even do that anymore. How many subway lines came up before 1940 and how many after? What has population growth been like since 1940? All bad on all counts.
We can articulate the solution but we can’t deliver it. Unless you already have this lifestyle you won’t get it. You have to move to where it already is. You can’t expect it to be built for yourself.
Oxford city center is extremely pedestrian friendly and yet it's also experienced this trend in the last 10 years. I don't think your comment is actually engaging seriously with what's been happening.
I've only briefly been to Oxford, but it felt like all of the nice places were locked inside the Westgate?
In general, it seems as if Oxford City Center is just too big: it can't sustain all of it, and people gravitate towards the nicer part, which is the Westgate.
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
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.
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).
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
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)
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.
>This’ll cheer you up: Northampton is used as a case study for a successful post-industrial town.
That same bent of evil people came to my town to peddle some "looks good from my ivory tower" type municipal trash policy that incentivize all the wrong things. They cited an adjacent town that adopted their stuff and is renown locally for its filth as a "success story". The public's reaction was literally "hahahaha, oh wait you're serious, hahahahahahahahahah". City councilor literally had to bang the gavel a bunch and tell the crowd to be serious. It was glorious. The city council is not likely to adopt it at this point.
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.
As a frenchman living in London for 10y+, I am always shocked when I go to medium sized cities in the UK. I love the country side though.
Joke is that UK is a third world country bolted onto London, obviously exaggerated but if you look at numbers and you go there yourselves there is some truth in it.
More than half of the shops are retail chains with stupidly bright colors that clash with the local architecture. The other half is cheap-looking stores and bad restaurants.
To illustrate my point, I picked a random town center on google maps:
I wish cities would treat high streets as public commons, rather than particularly valuable private real estate. Landlords are just looking to make the most rent possible and don't particularly care whether their tenants have positive utility for the community or not. Similarly, landlords have no problem keeping store fronts empty because they are holding out for a high paying tenant and have certain tax advantages.
I live in a little community outside Boulder, and we have a nice little main street area, only a few blocks, which is a good size for our community. There's a few restaurants, a cafe, a community space, some boutiques, all of which encourage foot traffic and liveliness. But recently, a little book shop devoted to kids books was forced out due to increased rent demands, and an architecture firm moved in. What was previously drawing maybe 100+ people a day to the main street now attracts 5 employees who work in a closed office. Not the end of the world for the main street, but if a few more shops make a similar decision it will be completely dead.
Our country has been sold off and scammed off. You don't understand the level of anger brewing. It's the same story across Europe and America.
People don't understand the scams but they smell it. They know how they remember things and they know that everything is getting worse not better.
I dare our governments to try and draft us into another war, literally dare them, even a war to defend our actual land - people have nothing to fight for and will turn their weapons on perceived perpetrators. It's brewing. This slow decline is painfully visible to people.
With 13% vacancy rate it's most certainly just very marginal businesses that stayed, so rents must be dirt cheap by now. Anything over 10-12% signals oversupply and it's a race to the bottom for landlords. Whatever it is, landlords are not to blame.
People just don't want to walk around places when they can drive and buy everything in one place.
"They do it because they can", this is the best explanation in so many cases, this not the exception.
My favorite Bankster(retired), has single handedly turned the main st in a small town here in Nova Scotia around, there were others holding on, and some trying, but her very accute targeting of interests and providing those services as loss leaders has drawn people back, and all the store fronts are occupied, and the vape shop is at the end of the strip.
The activity is high enough that some of the older established business interests were forced to leave there just out of town tax havens and grab a spot down town,while the grabbing was good.
Those shops are money laundering vehicles. Meaning: they are subsidized by cash from illegal activities and without that they'd be unprofitable as well, leaving high streets empty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's some truth to this. Compliance costs can be huge, particularly if you're dealing with anything that's toxic or dangerous. I worked at small electronics manufacturer in the 90s that spent an incredible amount of money making sure the area they washed the circuit boards with alcohol was up to code and all the paperwork was filled out properly. We didn't have anybody working there who even knew what the rules were.
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.
Part of the problem is that there's not really a way to ensure brick-and-mortar captures its value-add. It costs a lot of money to rent and staff the space, and there are real benefits to being able to browse in a real space (depending on the store in question, they can offer curation, close examination of the product, the sales staff can sometimes offer valuable suggestions or opinions, you can try on clothes, you can check compatibility of some products directly in the store or get a sense of how they actually look), but nothing but friction or a vague sense of guilt prevents a customer from using the store to choose a product, for free, and then ordering it for cheaper online, which completely screws over the physical location.
Possible solutions to this include
1. More stores introduce a paid membership. This is not a bad idea, a store pays for the cost of the physical location with the membership fee and has similar prices to online stores, and they have an incentive to maintain product quality, Costco is very successful with this model, but I'd be worried that that the model is begging for enshitiffication, you could really cash out on the store's reputation by lowering the product quality and increasing the costs and relying on the friction of the existing membership to keep customers for a fair while.
2. Stores focus on being an enjoyable experience, and hope that if you're spending enough time there, you're going to want to buy something. This is what Barnes and Nobles is doing, and most surviving malls.
3. Some sort of policy fix. I'd be in favor of an online shopping "tariff" designed to bring online prices in line with what it costs to run physical locations, collected by the feds and redistributed to localities. Has the minor downside that everyone but me would hate it, and it would be so monstrously unpopular that it could never happen. If we could figure out a way around that, though, it could be quite good.
The memberships idea suffers from the same problem we have on the internet -- nobody wants to manage a dozen different memberships in order to go shopping. They'll just use Amazon instead.
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...)
Charity shops actually get pretty decent footfall at least in my experience (but maybe that's just where I live). More than that they have a few structural advantages other than tax breaks which means they are able to compete where traditional retail can't - things like low staffing costs (if they use volunteers), no/very low inventory cost, and they are usually able/willing to sign up to lease terms which more commercial enterprises would either struggle to secure, or would be unable to live with (eg almost no security of tenure).
You expect retail outlets for that? 30 years ago when I was making my own shoes in London and wanted to buy hide I had to trail around grimy industrial areas to visit a wholesale warehouse and persuade them to do retail for a moment. (I bought my tools from other hobbyists.)
This. People forget how much more stuff was niche or industrial/b2b only before ecommerce came along.
Industrial businesses were less rigid about avoiding retail sales than today but it was still way more hassle and generally "the dark ages" comparatively.
Agreed. It's a whole lot easier to engage in esoteric hobbies these days, because there just has to be a single warehouse somewhere, maybe even in another country, willing to sell you what you need.
Periodically I watch YouTube videos made by a historian of clothing. She makes a lot of clothing for research and display, and she had an episode on where to purchase linen and what to look for to make sure you don't get a sub-par product. When I was growing up you just wouldn't have been able do something like that unless you were living somewhere like Paris or Milan.
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.
I have a running game with my husband wherever we visit somewhere new - what are there more of, barbers or nail salons? It's usually a close competition but there's always quite a few of each
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.
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.
This is in London, not in the main center but about halfway out. Many of the original towns and villages still kinda-exist to a certain extent (but obviously the gaps have been filled with urban sprawl) so there are lots of smaller "high streets" dotted throughout, typically near tube stations etc.
£1.85 each ride. So £3.70 round-trip if you can do it in just two rides. There are discounts if you are quick (e.g. you might only pay once) but it is time dependent.
Or just drive directly and quickly with zero hassle for pennies of electricity and free parking in a shopping center.
Yes I think that was parking cost not bus cost they were talking about (buses can be expensive for short journeys but the cost usually doesn't rise that much for longer ones in my recent experience - I paid £3 for a 40 min journey last week. But bus fares were capped at £2 for ages so I don't have a good feel now for what they cost).
Parking in premium areas can certainly be £5 an hour - but that really will be for premium areas with few spots and high demand, although that's a common situation in historic town centres. I wouldn't be mad enough to try and park in London but I'd expect parking there to be through the roof. The places I usually park for shopping etc (outside London but still SE) are more like £1 an hour in town centres, or free when the car park belongs to a shop or is in a less on-demand area.
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.
What do you mean no major reduction? You used to be able to park for free to pop into a shop to quickly grab something, now you have to pay high rates via another different app that you need to install and register your card on before you can even pay and you are fined automatically via CCTV if you run out of time or don't register and pay quickly enough. That did not happen a few decades ago.
Or just go to a supermarket or shopping center where parking is free and easy and you are not being preyed on by parking companies trying dark patterns to fine you.
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)
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.
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:
And doner kebabs on sale in kebab shops in the UK are of very dubious origin. There have been a variety of scandals over the years about the origins of the meat.
About 20 years ago I read an article in the metro newspaper about the origins of the meat, a study having been done, which found that most kebab meat in the UK was not what it said it was. A significant proportion contained a mix of lamb, beef, pork and unknown meats. And at that time most of the allegedly 'halal' doners on the market contained pork.
Recently one of the UK's biggest suppliers of kebab meat was fined for selling doner meat that advertised 87% lamb, but was found to be using large quantities of fat and skin, with meat making up between 10 and 50% depending on which source you read. The 'meat' itself, where it was even from sheep was largely neck trim and mutton trim, and they were using goat as well without labelling it - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy736xme2vvo
Maybe you found some good places in east London that were actually making their shawarma on-site. But the standard of a generic 'kebab' in the UK has always been known to be awful.
Take away kebab shops are the very bottom of the market for the most part.
If you want quality Turkish kebabs which are nicely cooked, generally identifiable and not swimming in grease you go to a Turkish barbecue grill restaurant.
I don't know how long you've been away but they're everywhere here now with not an elephant leg in sight. They'll even serve you a nice salad with bulgur wheat.
It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK if that's what you are looking for or that you can't buy terrible food in other countries such as Australia too.
About five years, I don’t believe for a second the market has changed that much across the country in that time.
Yes, you can get good Turkish food in a lot of places, and good Turkish food is delicious.
But the post I was responding to called out kebab shops in particular as excellent and I wouldn’t want people thinking they can get ‘good’ food in the average high-street kebab place.
Don’t get me wrong, it hits the spot after a skinful… but high-quality it is not. See my sibling post about the various meat-scandals.
> It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK if that's what you are looking for.
> Just as well I said nothing of the sort then eh?
I think you did.
I think you've presented criminal behaviour as if it's not an aberration.
You've ignored that there are good kebab shops and bad. That good high street kebab shops are common and sell more than just low quality donnas, including shish with fresh salad.
I never want to eat a donna kebab, so I don't order it.
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.
Are they really excellent? Kebab shops elsewhere in Europe are often associated with shady dealings. For example, in Finland a family will run one for a while for immigration fraud (while also dodging taxes), then hand it on to another immigrant family for rinse and repeat. Naturally, they serve the lowest-quality food they can get away with. In Poland many are owned by a mafia using exploited Bangladeshi labour to operate them with zero concern for food quality.
Modern döner-kebab meat is rarely the quality shawarma of a century ago. It is highly processed and basically a big hot dog.
The press coverage and statements by police and tax officials are there for you to read. To get you started, here's one [0] from Finland's public broadcaster that is hardly a bastion of "racist propaganda".
Kebab stores, local entrepreneurs unwilling to hire a local and pay EUR 1500, private universities, slumlords. That's how immigration and visa frauds operate in Poland, yes. Then immigration and visa fraud is only on the surface, behind there is likely some more serious organized crime.
Are you saying a hot dog flame kissed and scraped off with a knife and dumped into a pita with some yogurt/garlic/mayo/what have you sauce would not be delicious? Come on. People outside the US act all high and proud about the hot dog but literally every meat eating culture has some other scrap meat dish, sometimes its the whole anus rather than minced and put in a casing for you. Waste of the animal to throw out fine meat if prepared well.
Cultures may have traditional offal-based dishes, and indeed they can be delicious, but the meat is not highly processed, because that is something that came about only with modern industry. Just compare a photo of a hot dog or döner-roll mystery meat to one of those traditional dishes.
> Mercer says a part of town filled with ethnic minority shops and restaurants has been disparaged by some as “a foreign bazaar”. “Would they prefer the shops were empty? It’s much better to have busy shops, but people don’t like change.”
No, it's that I don't like the council and central government turning a blind eye to obvious crime fronts because they're desperate for the tax. Don't call me a bigot or xenophobe.
I would prefer them to be knocked down for housing frankly, as many town centres are close to useful train stations. The council can then use the council tax
Councils are supporting the don't build any housing any where mandate. It is such an obvious use of the land it's crazy. We still have to delusionally play along with ideas about how to "regenerate the high street".
Case in point. Huddersfield is currently "regenerating" its town borrowing huge sums for a new library and new markets etc instead of just flattening the town and replacing it with housing. The railway line is also having a major upgrade. The timing is literally perfect. Another own goal. But hey a lot of employment was generated and I'm sure the mandate to employ local didn't mean a lot of backhanders....
People will move to a shithole if it has good transport links to jobs, which Huddersfield has. Look at Romford for example. The council has sold off loads of land for flats and is selling more. All because of the new Elizabeth Line
Guess what the result is when 10,000s people with good jobs move in to an area? Demand for shops and services!
You have to understand that most people are emotional animals rather than rational students of economics. These are ultimately the lines of reasoning that steer our governments, vs those of rational students of economics.
Not sure about how to get out of this pickle. So many modern problems stem from the crash of our prehistory behavioral adaptions against new context brought on by civilization and technology, which now moves faster than we could actually adapt through natural selection.
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.
Thats funny how journalists ignore elphant in the room; UK non-domicile (non-dom) tax regime was officially abolished on April 6, 2025.
So a lot of high-earners would now have to pay UK taxes on worldwide income. So they left the country or only stay there mininal amount of days to not be considered resident.
Many high street businesses were working for these people with tons of disposable income.
Also criminal situation was little better when these high-profile people were roaming London streets. No one wanted something happen to them.
Oh yeah mate, I'm sure Rotherham high street has been blighted an outflow of non-doms.
Poundland[1] is going under as high net worth customers switch their purchases of multipack Wagonwheels to Dubai. ;)
This is just nonsense. If out of town retail parks are still flourishing then it's not a lack of consumer demand; it's price and convenience that matters.
1. Poundland is actually going under because a US private equity fund, Gordon Brothers, spied an opportunity to asset strip them by pretending to offer investment.
They were gifted the business for a nominal £1 and have refused all offers of a buyout that would keep Poundland afloat.
It comes down to money and the cost of living. Landlords are extracting rent, no room for entrepreneurship.
A race to the bottom, but I wouldn’t blame Amazon. Large multinational chains were hollowing out high streets and making them less pleasant before online shopping.
As another comment said, councils and government should treat high streets more like public commons, prioritising independent businesses and making places distinctive.
What frustrates me is that even prosperous areas with new developments rarely make space for small businesses. Instead, we get “private equity” chain.
Ugh, one I saw recently was Bristol University’s new campus by Temple Meads. The wall between the campus and station could have been lined with small, affordable units for independent and student-run businesses. Would love to browse a few interesting shops or grab a decent sandwich before catching a late train. 23m for a new entrance but where are the opportunities. (This is based off the media announcements, not walked through there yet)
What makes vape and nail shops uniquely able to afford these rents?
They sell fairly space-efficient, expensive products or services. Generally speaking, the higher you push rent per square foot, the fewer types of businesses you can operate, because people and products take up space and have throughput limits. Nail and beauty services can get spendy fast.
The US has something similar going on with medical and dental offices for the same reasons.
Outgoings are different - cheap/dodgy imports, and modern slavery (nail salons are infamous for this) mean that their outgoings can be much lower than other shops. There’s also the tax avoidance many of these businesses partake in, both in the traditional cash-in-hand-business fashion, and the more modern(?) “American Candy store” way (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61777445)
Hold On Right There.
There are people go out of their way to buy...American candy in the UK?
Utterly perverted.
They're some kind of tax/ business rates scam judging by how many there are.
Numerous reports over many years that they don't have many real customers and exist mainly to enable a tax scam / money laundering.
Links for the disbelieving
2022 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61777445
2025 https://www.cityam.com/how-money-laundering-took-over-our-hi...
(Yes, at the M&Ms shop in Leicester Square. Probably never visited by anyone from London, just tourists.)
But the "American Candy Shop" places were/are doing money laundering and/or tax fraud. They can say they sold individual candies for £0.50 (cost: 5p each), the profit goes to a shell company in the Virgin Islands etc, and before the business taxes are due the company "goes bust" and disappears. Then a new one takes its place.
4 years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/04/us-swe...
This year: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/18/dodgy-shops-ha...
No, which is why it's so transparent that these are money laundering operations
They're great for money laundering.
Who's to say how many clients a nail bar had? A box of fake nails is easily dumped in the bin.
Yes, one of the accounting bodies started warning a few years ago about the proliferation of barber shops being a front for money laundering.
The only way I can think to police it, would be for tax inspectors to stand outside and count the customers!
In fact that's exactly what large enforcement operations against these do, the problem is that they just close down, the person who they were registered to disappears(if they ever existed at all) and another shop opens in the same place registered to someone else. It's a game of whack a mole.
It's just stupid that councils have no problem arguing that say, Clarkson(sorry, stupid example) can't open a pub in a town with no other pub or other employment opportunities, but 17th vape shop on the same street is fair game and free market.
Pubs are regulated by a limited amount of alcohol licenses, which goes back centuries. Do you really want there to be licenses for other industries as well?
That's not what I said nor implied.
It's not about licences - councils can absolutely decide if a business can or can not operate in any area already, regardless of licence requirements.
> Do you really want there to be licenses for other industries as well?
Yes. I'm surprised that business licenses aren't already a thing.
I expect a competent government to issue licenses to barbers based off them proving hygiene standards, trained staff with college diplomas in hair-dressing, number of employees, and an extremely limited number of these to be issued based off local need calculated from population by census.
I expect local government to issue similar licenses for all other industries, who should prove their competency, adherence to standards, jobs created, and cater to local needs.
Vape shops sell addictive products and they have minimal overhead. I think the markup on a lot of what they sell, especially the more grey market stuff like nitrous oxide "whip cream chargers" and poppers, is quite high.
A lot that I see have extremely cheap-looking fixtures and little to no decor, and unlike virtually any other store, they stock what they stock, which is generally the same as every other vape shop, and don't even bother to fill out the entire space if it would hold more merchandise.
I assume some are able to negotiate lower rents in exchange for short term leases while the store is technically still on the market for a long-term lease, similar to a pop up store. A lot that I've seen could be shut down, with all the merchandise and equipment loaded into a UHaul, within a few hours if necessary.
Nail salons are similar. They really should have custom ventilation systems since they're working with paints and solvents and glues and nail drills/lathes, but this seems to not be enforced since they're seen as girly little spas rather than industrial workshops and are often staffed by poor immigrants.
They sell something that doesn't work so well online or at a supermarket. Ditto barbers, phone repair, or whatever racially-coded tabloid bugbear de jour. They work in a town centre, everything else can't beat the prices set by larger (often American-owned) businesses.
You can buy a vape online, but as a smoker, you don't want to wait a day when you've run out. Also as a smoker, I don't get why they're not regulated like tobacco. They shouldn't be sold alongside sweets, and should otherwise be treated like cigs (e.g. on packaging, licensing, advertising etc.). Seems very low-hanging legislative fruit.
> and should otherwise be treated like cigs (e.g. on packaging, licensing, advertising etc.).
I think you don't know why cigarettes are treated the way they are.
Hint: it's not because they are addictive. After all, caffeine is addictive and both tea and coffee is effectively unregulated.
Surface area needed is much smaller than most other shops.
They can’t. They tend to turn over like the rest. But as others noted, their low upstart costs makes them the more likely tenant out of other busines models on the sidelines seeking rent.
We all want little cutsey shops and such but how much money for that is actually sitting on the sidelines at any given time ready to pounce? Hardly any at all, if any. Nail shops and other bullshit on the other hand? There’s private equity specialized in selling shares of these schemes.
San Francisco forbids formula stores in many places. Okay, so we don't have a Chipotle and a Nordstrom Rack on Valencia St, but then a burrito on it costs $24.
Bristol is not SF. The cost of living is vastly less in the uk, especially outside of London.
okay but why? cost of living is less in america's burbs too. you are getting cause and effect reversed: the huge chain stores and PE firms, they are very efficient, i mean that's why they grow so big, and being efficient is strongly associated with lower prices.
PE firms are efficient... at maximising equity. A good example of what they do is find the maximum viable price consumers will pay.
A small business might be less accurate - figure out a "reasonable rate", and therefore charge less.
In stuff like restaurants though it translates to increased margin not lower prices. Mom and pop restaurant margin is like a few percentage points if you are successful. Some franchises sniff 10 even 25% for say a chic fil a.
A burrito at Chipotle in San Francisco is already like >$20. That's just the state of things.
> councils and government should treat high streets more like public commons, prioritising independent businesses and making places distinctive.
You're advocating central planning.
The real problem is that it's very hard to build stuff in the UK. This is a choice that the people have made and the status quo still continue until they choose differently.
> You're advocating central planning.
Central planning is the status quo. That's essentially what zoning rules are, and why everything is such a mess. You want to open a shop and live above it? No, sorry, not zoned for residential; banned. Operate the shop out of your house instead? Haha, banned. What if your shop really doesn't need very much space at all, so something the size of a closet would do as long as it's in the right location? Nope, minimum unit sizes or similar, prohibited by law. And so on.
If they want to stop doing this that would be great, but if they're not going to stop doing it then having the rules be things like "no chains" instead of "no small units" would certainly be an improvement.
Planning is such a strange thing. "You're not allowed to build homes unless you also build a creche (daycare)" - OK... but I'm a company that builds homes, I don't know anything about running a creche "well then nobody gets to have a home unless you pay up buddy"
It's not out of the realm of possibility for a real estate development company to partner with someone who runs daycares, surely? I'm sure the company that builds the homes already partner with a lot of different companies for specialized tasks?
Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default.
They can, and my statement is a bit of a caricature (it's not like I expect the person pouring concrete to be mixing baby formula a year later) but it seems like "but amenities!" is mostly a way to make sure any new arrivals have to pay for things for existing local residents. Development charges are similar.
Land and real estate is not unlimited especially in urban areas. Building companies optimize for profit so they don't have a good incentive to build out public necessities. It will be always a bit of squaring a circle if you want half sensible area development.
Building companies optimize for profit which is why they have a good incentive to build things that are in short supply. They build whatever the customer buys.
On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.
The requirements are nothing but a type of tax whose revenue is allocated to some de facto government program. But taxes on new development are asinine because they inherently get passed on as higher rents for humans and businesses, and the latter then have to pass them on as higher prices -- or can't afford them and go out of business, which is how you get the high street full of vape shops.
> On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.
That does not seem true. Most (though certainly not all) daycares I see in Europe have buildings that have a layout similar to a school with outdoor areas. A daycare doesn’t need a window front but needs a sandpit.
If maximising profit were actually allowed we’d have far more homes. The current rules make sure builders are -not- allowed to build as many homes as needed.
> Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default
I feel like the absurdity is the other way.
Consider the two components of a public daycare: Who runs it and who pays for it.
With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.
With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids. Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?
The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves. Whereas if the parent can do higher skilled work then they can still take the job and use the subsidy money to pay for daycare, even if they're not required to use it for that. So the better subsidy is the one in cash.
> With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids.
Here in Norway it's heavily subsidized. I don't know what the cost for the parents if it would've been if it weren't. But in this very high-cost country it costs about €200/month to have a child in daycare/kindergarten (ages 1-5, usually run separated in age groups 1-2 and 3-5). Second child simultaneously is cheaper. Third is cheaper still.
> Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?
I'm pretty sure that would leave us with extremely variable coverage for those who do choose kindergarten.
> With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.
I'm a free-marketeer. Yet I'm very much of the opinion that kindergartens are not suited for a "competitive market" (nor are e.g. hospitals). Although I am a free-marketeer, I also believe that these are services that should be available at quality to anyone independently of income. I'm very happy that my children are in kindergarten with children from families making half, and twice, of what my family makes.
> The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves.
How is this perverse? Do we not need people doing low-wage jobs? From your wording I feel almost sure you're American.
> But in this very high-cost country it costs about €200/month to have a child in daycare/kindergarten (ages 1-5, usually run separated in age groups 1-2 and 3-5). Second child simultaneously is cheaper. Third is cheaper still.
Because they're subsidizing the rest of the cost. But that's the issue. If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money? Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare. Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.
> I'm pretty sure that would leave us with extremely variable coverage for those who do choose kindergarten.
It would have a similar effect to having an economy that allowed more families to be sustainable on a single income rather than two. Then fewer of them would need daycare and there might be fewer daycares, but that doesn't seem like a great reason to force more kids into daycare, especially when the consequence would plausibly be something like the nearest one to you is 14 km away instead of 10 km.
> Although I am a free-marketeer, I also believe that these are services that should be available at quality to anyone independently of income.
But now you're talking about the price again.
Suppose the actual unsubsidized cost for providing quality service is X. If you provide a daycare subsidy for each child in the amount of X, it costs the government X, and then everyone can afford daycare. If you instead provide a cash subsidy for each child the amount of X, it costs the government X, and still everyone can afford daycare, because paying for it costs X and they received X in cash to use for that or anything else at their choosing.
> How is this perverse? Do we not need people doing low-wage jobs?
It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.
And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.
> Because they're subsidizing the rest of the cost.
I know. I used the price as an example to indicate how heavily subsidized it must be.
> If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?
Because the market for daycare will favor the well-off. You're just topping off the income of people who need daycare, then leaving everyone to fend for themselves. That's often OK. I think there are some sectors where it's not. Kindergartens being one. This is, for both of us, of course just opinions.
> Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare.
And if you hand off more cash, you get better daycare. And less cash, worse daycare. I'm totally fine with that logic for TVs and cars, not so much with our children. Even from a purely capitalist perspective: a major force in capitalism is rewarding and thereby incentivizing useful behavior – what behavior of the children are we incentivizing (resp. disincentivizing) by sending them to a good (resp. bad) kindergarten? It's absurd.
> Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.
And now you've taken a person out of the labor force. Possibly forever. Granted, there are some big open questions about the labor force going forward, but looking back decades it's been clear that that's a bad thing in western societies.
> It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.
None of this makes much sense in most cases. In my municipality, kindergarten employees are responsible for roughly 5 small children or 8 big children at any given time. There are no full-time jobs in this country that pay a fifth of a kindergarten employee's salary (yes yes, there are overheads etc).
But yes, I can see the math maybe working out if you have 4 children under the age of six and are working as e.g. a cleaner. Maybe. I think that's a very small segment of society. And you know, I'd much rather still send those kids to kindergarten, have them play with the children of millionaires and children like themselves all day, while the parent retrains for a job they'd rather do.
The person having so many children on such a low income is probably also living in very confined space. I'm sure those kids love the change of scenery!
> And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.
I agree that useful jobs should be well-paying enough that recruiting people into them doesn't require applying extra societal pressure. Of course.
> If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?
They did, for many years. It was a flagship policy of the Christian Democratic party. Labour and the left didn't like it because it was seen as keeping women dependent and out of the labour force (I think something like 90% of the time, it was the woman who took advantage of the subsidy). The far right didn't like it, because it was very often the wrong kind of woman who chose to stay at home with their 2 year old. So it was steadily reduced until I think it was removed entirely.
It should also be said that a lot of parents who took the stay at home subsidy didn't actually stay at home, but hired a nanny instead of sending their children to kindergarten. That got disapproval even from the traditionalists.
And why even have regulations?! Any idiot can look after a few kids!
It's not strange at all, without zoning you get shops (and buildings) which extract all the shared value of a community and give nothing back.
I live in a tourist town in Norway. There are some nice shops. A nice cafe run by some Italians, a coffee place which started out as a church initiative (then got kicked out from their original locale when it turned out they were much, much better at selling good coffee than evangelizing) which has awesome concerts and an art gallery, to name two of my favorites.
There are also tourist tat shops. Dozens of them. One prominent one at the entrance to the main shop with a blinged-out AI generated moose. Oh, and casinos - I mean bingo places. They just extract money. The owners don't live here, so they don't care. They're parasitic, they might well go broke without the few positive externality shops around them - but they make more money than those decent shops. And landlords set the rent accordingly.
Of course there's one place where they do central planning, where they realize that externalities are crucial in retail and charge rent accordingly, and where there's not a single tourist tat shop. That place is the mall.
> It's not strange at all, without zoning you get shops (and buildings) which extract all the shared value of a community and give nothing back.
I don't see that in Japan, which is very liberal in zoning. Taiwan is less liberal but doesn't pick which shops. Both are wonderful countries with vibrant, dynamic cities. We have friends in both places, and family in the latter, and life is quite pleasant.
I get that if building homes somehow created more people. What we have now is people living in cars, people and their kids living in 1 room apartments, etc. and we're telling them "it is better for you to live in horrible conditions than it is for us to build new homes because we won't have all the amenities (half the time this is just code for 'parking') built by the developer"
So a child living in the middle of nowhere gets to never see their parent because that parent spend 4 hours a day commuting, because building flats in the city isn't allowed. Where is that kid going to daycare now?
Huh? I don't get what this has to do with what I wrote. That sounds like it is about residential zoning requirements. You can build flats here, and especially you can section your old buildings into umpteen tiny apartments. You can't tear down the architecture that makes this town a tourist destination, but that's about it.
(Actually you can do that to, if you just buy it up and let it fall into disrepair, argue it has no value now and tear down everything but the facades. That's how we got the aforementioned mall)
Because without planning there would be only houses and no daycare. Apartment complexes are the most profitable type of building (everybody needs an apartment to live), at least in my country, and daycares and schools are other infrastructure are not profitable and not worth investing if investor had a choice. They are a burden. So they make investor have no choice and carry a burden.
Where do those kids go to daycare now?
But if you don't do that, what you end up with is housing projects - "villages", they're often called in the marketing brochure, built on greenfield sites with no access to amenities except by car. They're expensive, built to really crappy standards, and there's kind of nothing for anyone to do except stare at their huge flat-screen TV mounted too high on their grey-on-grey living room wall.
The article is from the UK where two stories buildings with a shop on the street front and accommodation above is very common.
U.K. planning is decided by local councils
It's decided by local councils together with corporations, rather than what it should be, local councils together with local residents.
Zoning in the American sense doesn't exist in the UK, outside of Local Development Orders and (maybe, if you squint a bit) the system of Brownfield Land Registers.
Outside those very limited exceptions, planning in the UK is done on a discretionary basis, and both the discretionary system and the LDOs are overseen by Local Planning Authorities made up of elected local councillors.
There's no central planning authority, and the system is designed to be flexible at the cost of providing less certainty to developers. Mixed use developments are the norm here, and most new residential blocks will have some form of commercial or social space on the ground floor.
Only to the extent that all government is central planning, as I read it. Your sewage system is centrally planned, but that's okay, right?
The UK can't make stuff because the rent is too high. Fix this and a lot of stuff downstream of it will change.
Central planning is making the rent too high. The UK isn’t rich enough for stuff to be expensive because of extremely high demand. Its expensive because it’s too hard to build stuff.
It wouldn't have such a dire need to build stuff without constant high immigration tbh.
The UK wouldn’t accept the pain necessary to start making things again just like we were never going to accept the changes needed to make Brexit a success.
How could we have made Brexit a success? I really didn't see many people saying how we could do that.
Redefine success to “kids leave school for factory jobs and never have to hear someone speak another language”, tada.
Making brexit a success is scheduled right after proving P = NP. You know, because we do the easier things first to keep the queue short.
The real problem is that everyone wants the best land in the best places and we've been arguing about it ever since.
Maybe some amount of central planning wouldn't be bad? Maybe when it's broad strokes designations of public space usage and not how many toilet paper rolls one gets it can be a net benefit?
> You're advocating central planning.
Which seems to be working pretty well in China.
When Britain was building new towns post WWII it involved a lot of central planning, and seemed to go pretty well.
For what it’s worth I had the same thought as the ancestor post. Town squares are as privatization friendly as water, electricity, and oxygen. We just took it for granted that they were self sustaining as a public amenity and are now suffering because rich people bought up everything and are renting it back to us at half the quality and twice the price.
> You're advocating central planning.
You state this like it's inherently something to be avoided but you give no reason for believing so
There is already central planning, it's just done between the state and corporations, which also includes landlords. They're advocating for a result that would be accomplished by corporations playing less of a role and local residents and workers playing a greater role in the planning.
See the Astley (Wigan) Warehouses and SIP car parks for two prime examples.
It’s the single biggest problem facing society. If we could stop this rent extraction the economy would prosper.
I rent a workspace outside of my home, I'm paying less than 150 quid for a room in a light industrial zone. Gives me space for my fun stuff as well as work. I love having my own space, and it's very affordable.
I was just looking at the prices for city centre commercial rental in my nearest town. Huge spaces available, it's generally more per month, and I'd be worried about the rates threshold, but at a lower price point we'd be in business.
I think there's something to that. More people using a centre for work would create more opportunities in towns.
Again, I think the challenge the UK has is the gross differential between incomes and the cost of buying or renting property. Unsustainable, and very much part of these morbid symptoms.
That is a very valid point. However, I suspect that some of the businesses that managed to survive transitioned into operations that function solely as fulfillment centers for dispatching packages.
The issue with that approach is that it results in numerous vacant spaces, which fail to attract enough foot traffic to be appealing to other businesses.
There was a struggling shopping mall near my home. Many retailers left the premises after one of the big stores shut down. Recently some other big brand occupied the space, in a couple of months besides it there is a Samsung store and an apple store. Now all spaces are busy and they stay busy all week long.
This makes me suspect that we highly optimised for the "2010s" online era without considering the side effects.
Don't forget the brutal taxes in the UK in relation to the current economic circumstances.
The UK economy has faltered and not had a chance to recover since 2008. The more recent improvements really because of a reproachment of Brexit and global concerns around the US are welcome but not necessarily structural improvements in the UK.
It's no coincidence that the businesses that can easily evade tax and usually also sell illegal goods are the ones that dominate the high street.
Commercial property on our high streets is owned, in the main, by foreign investment firms that treat it as an asset.
In many cases you can’t find out who the owner is. There’s too many shell companies involved.
These firms don’t care about occupancy, they care about the resale book value.
Business tax rates are based on those property valuations.
There’s no chance the property companies will reduce the value of their portfolio to reduce burden for tenants they don’t care about.
Then you have foreign online retailers like Amazon and Temu able to use complex multinational tax avoidance schemes and fake products to undercut the high street.
How can you compete if Amazon can deliver a knock off from China, that you can’t legally sell, faster than you can stock a real one into the shop, and at half the price?
> How can you compete
Convince your neighbors that it's better to buy products they know from producers they trust from neighbors they live near.
It's small town and old school, but I don't see any other solution.
I agree. Every pound spent locally massively benefits society.
If good shops are available people will use them, if they provide what they're looking for.
I think we need the government to look at how retail works and what shoppers actually want.
There's not much local shops can do about the long tail, they can't stock everything. At the very least need to stop penalising them financially and allowing online retailers to compete on tax avoidance.
My father is old and naive. He was tricked into ordering fake "Yorkshire" tea bags from Temu. Fake tea bags for gods sake. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.
We have no control on the quality coming from these sites. We can't even guarantee items are not made using slavery. Both Temu and Chien executives refused to reveal that in parliamentary investigations.
Stuff like that has to stop, standards needs to be universally applied or the bad will drive out the good.
From a systems dynamics point of view this is unstable as defectors still enjoy the benefits of nice enviroments while paying non of the costs (e.g. go window shop and try things on for size, then by the stuff from a low cost dropshipper).
So unless your "convicing" is a serious eufimism for fairy drastic emforcement, the plan is doomed.
If your neighbor is a defector (a game theoretically optimal name for "an asshole") there's nothing to do but turn the other way and talk to your neighbor over the other fence.
Social exclusion, like putting a kid in timeout.
Maybe they will get the hint, maybe not.
I remember watching a video of retail tycoon Mike Ashley at a UK Parliament Select Committee hearing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn3p7by5F0I
A lot of what he said about the root causes of why UK high streets were dying seems to have been accurate, and this is before the double whammy of the Covid pandemic and the increase in interest rates to tackle inflation (as well as the mini-budget crisis of 2022), plus energy prices for shops and pubs in the UK are really high.
Retail parks are so popular in the UK because being able to visit a couple of stores in the park and do your shopping in one hit, plus the cheap/free parking, and that is ultimately what UK shoppers want - convenience.
If councils want to rescue their high streets, they may have to get more creative when it comes to getting new stores to open, beyond just offering a respite on business rates.
Mentions the druggies in passing twice (once in a quote) and an astronomical crime level (160 per 1000 people? So I have a 16% chance of being a victim??) but zero mention of either at the end of the article in terms of fixing the issue.
Zero info on who the government hundreds of millions is going towards to help the problem (let me guess: a bunch of nonprofits who won't solve the problem).
> and an astronomical crime level (160 per 1000 people? So I have a 16% chance of being a victim??)
Not even close, unless you own a shop (in which case, in some areas, life can undeniably be exasperating and miserable). The vast majority of high street crimes are shoplifting or possession (or drinking in alcohol control areas) and an astonishingly large number are attributed to a tiny, tiny number of people.
There are high crime areas in most towns in the UK where you will feel pretty safe, because the crime is simply not directed at you.
When it does spill over into personal violence, it is the aforementioned handful of people with drug problems. It’s worth noting that one incident involving three people is likely to result in a dozen recorded crimes. And a British town of sixty thousand people will have so few of these prolific individuals that they themselves commute to neighbouring towns to steal.
Worth remembering also if you are an American that in the UK we have not decriminalised marijuana, so there are drug possession and small-scale dealing crimes in there too.
I would kindly disagree. In my rather "posh" and "good neighborhood " little village I've had 3 house robberies (well, one robbery and 2 attempts) in the span of 14 months, and I have myself witnessed two shop robberies as I was in Sainsburys for milk and eggs.
The crime is there, can be absolutely overwhelming and police does absolute f*k all about it (after the robbery they didn't even bothered to shop up, I was told over by phone to collect the evidence myself and bring it to the police because "we are solving these crimes from the office" by the investigating officer. They didn't solve that one).
Posh might be part of the issue. In my area seems like most home robberies are in wealthy neighborhoods, where no ones home and there might be nice jewelry to steal instead of my sad ancient tv.
I’m wondering why societies choose to put up with this?
What do you mean?
We don’t, burglaries have been on a decades long decline in the UK.
One person’s anecdote is not data.
> an astonishingly large number are attributed to a tiny, tiny number of people.
That sounds like something that would be extremely easy to fix!
It’s not, particularly, without unjust laws like three strikes.
For one thing, it’s a revolving cast of a few dozen people at any one time (people do go to prison, get rehabilitated, move on or get moved on). For another, they are often vulnerable or exploited: a lot of shoplifting is done to order, to supply the black market.
The UK does need to take shoplifting more seriously, but it’s important to understand that it is a consequence of both the design of retail (self-checkout and fewer staff) and of the cost of living.
There is nothing unjust about being expelled from society when you are found to be too damaging.
What is unjust, though, is to be the victim of criminals who benefit from knowing exactly what the threshold is to not being removed from society.
Three strikes, in particular, is inherently unjust. There's no serious argument that it is not.
Silly fake faux-old-testament solutions like this don't actually work, as is demonstrated by the fact that most crime has fallen faster since they were abandoned.
Not only that, this specific town was the first one where the allegations about grooming gangs and police acquiescence emerged:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
It sounds like a very rough place, with very incompetent police.
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....
"Souvenir megastore"?! I mean, seriously...
Yeah they’re crazy. Big space very nice. Two staff. Heated space (with open door).
…we were the only customer there. There is no way in hell there isn’t something dodgy afoot. Would be surprised if they have 50 bucks of legitimate revenue a day
The linked article established that they indeed get a lot of sales that should make them viable businesses. In the given location, at least.
Who is buying pack of cheetos for 12 GBP?!
UK high streets have been in some kind of decline (IMO) for decades now. Long before online shopping, COVID and its repercussions, and the current wave of street crime (phones, watches) and front businesses (vape and phone repair shops hiring dozens of "skilled" workers on visas... to work in a tiny cupboard unit with implausible turnover). Even when a new "luxury" apartment block is constructed, the retail units often remain vacant for years before being occupied by a constantly changing list of tenants, none of which seem to be able to make a success of it. The nursery becomes a dojo, which becomes a social enterprise cafe, which eventually becomes an estate agent, which then closes.
Rents are high, parking difficult, the products undifferentiated (carbon copy list of the same 15-20 chain franchises), not unique. After all of that, I'll assume prices are no better and may be worse than online retail.
I'm not sure what the answer is, as retail is not my area of expertise. However I think that if there is a solution it will have something to do with people, community, and offering a specifically local experience. Not one which is purely a chore, and I think it will involve much more than just "convenience".
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.
Chips are fried edibles ;)
Oh that definitely exists. I've bought a bag of THC chips before.
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).
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 are right that the units sit empty because the banks have loan covenants with the landlords that minimum rent is XX, which is higher than the unit is currently worth.
It isn't so much extend and pretend, its landlord CANT lower the rent without violating their loan.
If you get government involved, this will just get more expensive. We need to wait it out until the landlord can't pay the loan anyway and is forced to sell the building at a massive loss. Then the new owner will have a new loan with a new price floor and the dance can start over.
> It isn't so much extend and pretend, its landlord CANT lower the rent without violating their loan.
IANAPropertyGuy, but IIRC the banks don't really want to foreclose on it anyway, because that means recognizing that they made losing loans and they don't want to have to figure out what to do with the building that can't be sold off for much.
Hence strategically looking the other way when landlords off "first X months free" deals in lieu of an officially-lower rent.
This is exactly the case. On my Canadian high street the redevelopments are either empty or exclusively high cost businesses. I looked at the rent arrears notice posted on one failed shop and the rate would exclude anything not a money mill. They'll be no lutiers or second hand bookstores in the shiny towers on my street.
What if you had a rental agreement where you pay $x for y% of the property but the landlord lets you use the whole thing and x/(y*0.01) > minimum rent?
Or you pay minimum rent but your landlord gives you some of it back?
Idk, there's probably room for creativity here
How are they artificially inflated? Do you mean through taxation?
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.
This is incredibly wrong.
Investment real estate has traditionally been a way for individuals and small landlords to build wealth over time. More recently, governments have decided that they want to add tons and tons of regulations to rentals, making it impossible for small landlords to continue to make a profit. Hence, they sell to big landlords who are impossible for tenants to deal with.
You are conflating non local and local government. Your town doesn't levy capital gains but your state or nation may.
Do you understand where that "built wealth" comes from? It doesn't appear from the ether - it's transferred from one person to another. In this case, it's transferred from a legitimate useful business to a rent-seeking investor who creates no value but holds value hostage. And if the amount of "built wealth" is too high, no business exists that can afford to pay it, and so it doesn't get "built".
Traditionaly as in since what post redlining ban downzoning in the 1960s? No peasant was expecting their hovel to be an investment vehicle where they’d replace the doorknobs with cheaper furnishings and 10x their investment and somehow their peasant kids working peasant jobs would afford that.
I mean isn’t the whole rub the cost of housing is outpacing wages? Goes to show how short our historical perspective really is.
> No peasant was expecting their hovel to be an investment vehicle
It is not:) There had been a fortunate coincidence of factors such as economy, job market, demography, immigration from EU countries which all enabled it. That's all over now, it's gone.
What happens when all rent is extracted? We're about to find out.
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.
Why have you placed “facts” in quotation marks?
we live in a (post truth) society
The original use of quotation marks in English, before scare quotes came along, was to suggest that the words you're using came from someone else. Fun fact: that's actually why they're called quotation marks.
That's what's going on here. @passive is repeating the word "fact" from the parent comment.
Why is it so hard to admit that there is a cultural (and, by extension, racial) component?
Acknowledging that contradicts liberal ideology, which is the closest thing most people have to religion in modern western society.
It's not merely a bit controversial, it's heresy
Because in a large number of cases, people are conflating economic situation with culture or race. And many of these so-called cultural or racial components disappear in the "home" country when you look at people in the middle class and above. Just like violent crime rates drop massively for those same races and cultures in the country they have immigrated to when they gain economic independence.
It's quite possible that high levels of immigration of unskilled or otherwise unemployable people is a bad thing for a country that shouldn't be allowed. That is a very different thing than acting like the reason it is a bad idea is because of their culture or race.
Of course there is one, but what exactly is "immigrant culture"?
That is my problem with the whole thing, all just gets thrown into one bag "immigrants". The women assaulting islamist gets the same label as the homosexual atheist fleeing where they are in charge. (And never mind that the bible contains mostly the same bad passages as the quoran and I never done the numbers, but I assume if we count and plot "muslims killed by non non muslims vs "non muslims killed by muslims" - that number would not match the felt reality)
Why is it so hard to admit that there is a cultural (and, by extension, racial) component?
What does "by extension" mean? Culture is voluntary. You can (and should) walk away from a flawed culture. Race is an unsheddable fixed attribute.
Meanwhile, both culture and race see more variation within groups than they do between groups, making discrimination a losing proposition even aside from its inherent immorality.
>both culture and race see more variation within groups than they do between groups
Btw, the premise underlying this fact is a fallacy. It is the norm for population groups, even meaningfully differing ones, to have "more internal variation" than between groups.
There is more variation in height within sexes than between them, but despite this there is still a very (statistically and culturally) significant difference in average height between men and women.
It's even possible for two distributions to be completely separated by a given variable while still having more internal variance.
Nobody is scapegoating anything.
I'm just stating a fact: the presence of dangerous immigrants in downtown Reggio Emilia or Modena make these cities less safe, especially for women.
Immigrants make less than 10% of the population but account for 52% of small and 74% of violent crime, while sexual harassment reaches almost 90%.
I have been assaulted twice, my SO and her friend have been, and anybody we know has a similar story.
They make locals less prone to go shopping, and as shops close it enforces the vicious cycle of people not going downtown and thus more shops closing.
> 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.
What are some of the other "facts" "we" know about? Are you conveniently ignoring the Epstein class and all we've learned?
The most powerful men in the world do not loiter in city centres, which is what the commenter is referring to. It is a common phenomenon across Europe, readily observable, that groups of young men, commonly (but not exclusively) foreign, loiter in loose groups in town and city centres, where they appear to be doing... nothing.
I think the commenter has expanded further on what he or she thinks they ARE doing, I reserve judgement - but this phenomenon is apparent.
That is completely true and fascinates me. If you go to any city centre, train station, etc. in Europe, you will find lots of black people just... doing nothing. They are just there, sitting, perhaps alone, perhaps many of them. They aren't even talking or doing anything, they just stare into the distance. They are part of the scenery. I have no idea what this means, who brought them here, what they actually do (if anything), and who's going to take them away (and when).
>One of the only "facts" we know about crime is that it correlates very closely with poverty
Yes, but be careful about implying that the dominant causation is poverty -> crime. Crime is the best cause of poverty because it makes doing business impossible and forces every actor to make every aspect of their life more and more inefficient in order to protect what they already have. Places like, say, Singapore are case studies in how a crackdown on law and order is all it takes to make a place go from very poor to extremely wealthy in a generation or so.
Wasn't too long ago people in the US were saying those kinds of things about Italians.
Yeah, we remember. And thanks to the attitude displayed in your comment, these complaints were not taken seriously. until these specific Italians ended up with control of massive illegitimate industries, gambling, and loan sharking, ran protection rackets that victimised and intimidated thousands of legitimate small businesses, and murdered hundreds of innocents.
...which was finally ended by the RICO act; which is almost certainly unconstitutional, but has been allowed to fester b/c the Mob was (so far) worse.
So people should have been discriminatory against Italians? What are you getting at?
There was always the option to just not let them in in the first place. Many people at the time (HP Lovecraft being an example) thought that Ellis-Island migration into the United States was an existential mistake.
..and in the case of some of those Italians, they were absolutely right.
High-trust Anglo civilization is not compatible with the attitude towards civil authority common in the 19th-century Mezzogiorno. It took literal generations to fix.
It is not racism if they can point to actual statistics. It is racism if they just say it's immigrants but it's not. Which is it?
in this case looks a lot like racism to me
>In the average European mediterranean city shops provide lights, vibe, safety.
It's incredible how much of what we consider safety ultimately boils down to totally arbitrary vibes. There are tons of cities in the mediterranean that are way more dangerous than the worst parts of the uk, but because Italy has better PR (and isn't the target of right-wing hysteria), nobody cares.
> It's incredible how much of what we consider safety ultimately boils down to totally arbitrary vibes.
Are there parts of society where this is different? This whole going concern is vibe-based.
People respond to what's happening locally. There's no question UK towns have been getting more lawless and dangerous than they were, say, twenty years ago. It may not be very bad in absolute terms, but that's not the criteria people use for comparison.
There is a lot of question if this is the case: https://policinginsight.com/feature/analysis/most-crime-has-...
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.
Is there any discussion on the role of “welfare benefits” on this?
To add to the headline I would say hairdressers/barbers and bad takeaways could also be added to the list.
What shops would you suggest could be added? Most people are buying larger items and clothes online or in chain retail park stores.
My small town has multiples of all of these but also many nice cafes/bars/restaurants and a butchers, bakers, a small market and fruit and veg, a couple of diy/hobby shops as well as 3 supermarkets, a library etc. There are even a couple of clothes stores and some pound shop type places.
I can't really see much of a change coming here or how it could be much better. Our 2 nearest city centres have a bit more variety but of course are mainly chain stores. People go out for an experience rather than shopping and this had already started well before covid hit.
EDIT: Interesting they chose Rotherham as an example, of course if they'd chosen Harrogate, Oxford, Durham, Bath etc the story would have been quite a bit different...
Yes, there's specific nuances to Rotherham that I think it underplays. Severe and worsening deprivation since industry closed down in the 80s, and it's turning slowly in to a satellite area of Sheffield. Infact, Sheffield put a lot of energy in the 90s and 00s in to blocking major reconstruction efforts, there's a reason the IKEA ended up not being built in Rotherham (where it would have been much cheaper).
Also, right behind where that header photo was taken, is a GOOD example of attempts to regenerate the high street.
But the causes are much longer reaching than anything this points to – it's been in decline in Rotherham since probably the 1970s.
The broad strokes are true in general, though.
Free parking, turn the centre into a relaxing space/park, with kids' playground.
Add coffee shops and restaurants nearby, help promote casual entertainment venues like mini golf, community theatre, and weekend markets.
Grow from there based on the type of demand that appears, keep business rates low for the area.
They say it can't be done, but when that last shop closes right now there will be no choice.
To combat the dereliction and anti social behaviour they would have to rebuild anyway, and it will cost them more later than gradual repurpose/ investment.
This is it, and I have heard politicians talk about these same ideas for years in my area. Alas, it looks like it's easier said and done, because the downward spiral is still ongoing.
And one of the reasons is definitely that out of your list, city planners have very different ideas about the first point, free parking. They want the opposite: ideally, no cars in the city at all. So, parking fees have been raising to exorbitant ranges as they want to incentivize people to take public transport instead. Except that people instead turn to internet shopping.
I'd replace the free parking with great public transport and cycling infrastructure. The parking spaces can be in the surrounding area, with frequent public transport between them and the centre.
Look at European cities that have implemented this even in part, and tell me it isn't much nicer with fewer cars. Shopkeepers are usually opposed to it before, but see that the improvement in atmosphere attracts more customers than are lost through the lack of parking spaces.
> Look at European cities that have implemented this even in part,
Which European cities would those be? And I'm not interested by the tourist-infested ones.
It’s not uncommon to see the car debate come up in threads like these. As someone who lived in central London for over a decade without a car and recently moved out where not having a car is incredibly inconvenient, I’ve experienced both realities.
Only yesterday, I drove into London and walked nearly 20k steps to visit the various locations on my itinerary. Not every inch of a space need be a road, but banning cars and insisting everyone walk or use public transport also isn’t the answer. We need roads adjacent to large, pedestrianised areas.
The specific problem with the UK is how London-centric and unreliable our transport infrastructure has become. Not to mention driving can be incredibly fun! Much more so than cycling when it’s pouring with rain, you’re going to a fancy event, or have a large amount to move.
I wouldn't say driving in the rain is fun, it's just slightly less bad than cycling maybe. I look around and don't see many people having fun in cars, it's mostly just anger, frustration and an inability to break the cycle. The only ones having fun are the fictional characters in the adverts. I think the sooner we stop pretending it's still fun and start treating it like the chore it is the better.
It's fun if you drive a convertible in Tuscany between village A and village B. Otherwise it's indeed just... work.
That's a thing I noticed in these discussions but also in real life developments: one party/group has strong opinions on what would work for them, probably even based on valid data, so they get elected/nominated and start implementing them - in complete ignorance of the valid data and opinions of the _other_ groups/parties. So they might reach (some of) their own goals while trampling the others' goals, so there's unhappiness and they get replaced with a new party/group which proceeds with the same losing approach just in another direction. Heck, nobody seems to be able _in_practice_ to join and overlap the expectations of the entire community and try (at least) to build a neighborhood for all its members. And it's frustrating.
With some exception e.g. London as you mentioned, councils have gone out of their way to make taking cars into town inconvenient, but put zero effort into making it easy to get there any other way. Result is that people prefer either out of town shopping centres with free parking or shopping online.
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.
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.
Loads of European cities and towns have developed extensive pedestrian-only zones. It doesn't necessarily bring life back after the Covid years. Many people today are going out less regardless of what nice amenities urban planners provide, and having food delivered appeals more to many young people than actually visiting an eatery.
I'd say it's necessary but not sufficient. The place has to be a place people want to be, and cars are just one part of that.
My observation in europe is that pedestrian only areas in city center tend to be the most commercially successful areas in large cities.
In small towns maybe less because most people going shopping aren't from the town itsef but its surroundings so if they need to bring a car in the first place, they'd rather go where they can park it. And this is somehow a failure on how most european cities have tackled mobility itself. A lot of urban areas have been equipped with more or less secure bike paths, but they too often become impractical or plain dangerous outside in the larger area outside of the cities.
The confounding variable is the correlation with these pedestrianized areas with guarenteed foot traffic and hungry belly tourist traffic especially from more deeply pocketed people capable of international travel than locals.
These areas aren't only used by tourists. People genuinely like them. Tourists actually often make them less attractive and affordable because price go up and quality of services tend to go down.
Well no, but its a huge leg of the chair, those tourists with their disposable income fit for European vacation from half the world over, who are guaranteed to show up in this particular neighborhood for probably forever, vs the tesco on the outer ring road.
Funny hearing this about the UK where a major A road looks like some dusty forgotten american rural county route. You can complain about building for the car after you’ve ripped apart the middle of london for a 12 lane viaduct freeway with four level interchanges.
Any road, no matter how small, prevents the area around the businesses from being a social space.
If you can’t put a picnic table on it, it’s a place where movement must be prioritized over recreation.
That was planned after the war, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Ringways but mostly didnt happen apart from a few pieces like the Westway.
But we did remove traffic from half of Oxford Street last week.
My partner works in planning and economic growth for a council and the level of local opposition to this especially from local businesses is enormous. But every time I go to a high street I look around and think "this would be nicer if it wasn't for this bloody road".
Death of the city happened after death of the third place. In between were the consequences of white flight made possible from suburbanization.
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?
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.
they're saying they're drug fronts / money laundering
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.
just curious, what do you consider 'good' American candy?
I mean, Ghirardelli chocolate is nice, and I am fond of Junior Mints & Bit-O-Honey..but you can miss me with most Hershey and/or Mars products.
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.
Cheap to patronize, low barrier to entry, and can’t be done over the internet.
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.
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'.
Your point sounds sound other than the overt insinuation that its all rooted in fraud.
Money laundering taken as a whole is estimated to be the fifth largest economy in the world. Bigger than Germany’s. He’s not wrong.
IIRC in the UK specifically it's the biggest export industry. It's why the City of London (not to be confused with the city that is called London) won't ever be broken up.
Laundry.
Laundries w/ wifi, I have found, are far superior to working at than coffee shops.
Built in white noise generator too!
Incredibly low capex and opex so once you've got it running you can basically just throttle the business in accordance with demand.
I always think that they're fronts for money laundering. They're easy to set up and don't require lots of expensive equipment and they're probably mainly cash based (never visited one, so guessing here).
One thing that isn't brought up is that businesses like these are a third space, especially for women. They go there to hang out, chat, destress. So there's always going to be demand.
Nail salons have been opening right next to each other in my area, so I've been pondering this for awhile. It may just be a question of starting capital. You don't need much to start a nail salon. They don't have special furniture (the foot places do, but I'm just talking about the manicure places). They stock only a tiny amount of supplies. They don't need a web presence, or a lot of marketing in general. They don't require special equipment or stock nontrivial amounts of dangerous chemicals.
The biggest cost is labor, but labor money isn't something you need up front, since presumably at that point you have money coming in.
I realize everyone who's watched Breaking Bad thinks it's all about money laundering, but that's not as easy to do anymore, at least where I live, and the nail salons are proliferating.
In the US, someone involved in some kind of money laundering task force explained to me that a lot of those short lived stores are used to launder money and other money related operations. Lots of barbershops for example had the only same 5 people all day long talking smoking and occasionally getting cuts yet the store was making as much revenue as a high frequentation store...
Unfortunately it's a trend that is expanding worldwide, but who wants to visit a city that offers the same of any other city? It's like plastic copies of the same product over and over again. Like an Andy Warhol piece.
Remove the cars. Remove the parking. Make space for people and not cars.
And what will people do there? There's only so many restaurants and pubs a street can support.
Live there
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)
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 ceases to baffle me to see the progressive cosmopolitan types being utterly detached from the reality they live in.
Hello! Progressive cosmopolitan type here to tell you that living in the city center and walking everywhere, whenever possible, is the best life I've ever had - well worth the premium I pay in order to enjoy it. You have no idea what you're missing.
hello! yes, that's exactly what I assume when I see walkable cities evangelism. I assume it's being evangelized by people who WFH or live near work, have a supermarket across the street, and get everything else delivered to their doorstep. I understand why cars may seem obsolete from their perspective, even a nuisance interfering with their 5-minute strolls to the coffee shop. but the overwhelming majority of us unfortunately lives in a vastly different reality.
Only because we have built our cities to prioritize car storage above all else. If we stopped building for cars and built for people instead things would change quicky.
And what does building for people look like, precisely? I live in a 1910s London housing estate with pretty ordinary single family sized homes with gardens and lots of green space. Cars were not really a big deal when they designed and built the place, pretty much everyone walked everywhere and had e.g. coal and milk etc delivered by horse. Its no slum and is generally seen as quite a desirable place to live even now and commands a premium.
Yet this is no utopia, despite being designed for people (...and horses!).
It takes 20 mins to get to the tube station or the area with the shops on foot (3 or 4 minutes driving - and these are small shops, not even big ones). Like what do you actually want it to have? A supermarket on every street corner? And a tube station and doctor's and a dentist and a cafe and a school and a cinema and a sports center and a museum and a library, on every corner? You can't have that density of things people want all within 5 or even 10 minutes walking unless you build some sort of ultra high-density high-rise city of the future where 10s of thousands of people live in a single 250-storey building (and then you end up "commuting" inside that buildings elevator system...).
Back in real life what you do have is a 5 minute walk to the bus stop where you wait for 5 to 10 minutes for the bus to come, then you sit on the bus for 10-30 minutes while it slowly slowly slowly goes some indirect route and then you get out and walk 5 to 10 minutes at the other end (assuming there is a single bus route that goes roughly where you need and you don't have to get off and wait again to change to another route to get to your final destination...). Then repeat the return journey carrying 15kg of groceries. Eventually, 2 hours later, you get back home.
Or just drive for 10 minutes to the shops and drive back. Which is what everyone does because people can't spend multiple extra hours a day just for getting around on foot and bus to buy food for the next few days (and you can only do a few days at a time as your are physically limited by what you can carry) or going to the doctors or getting the kids from school or whatever.
The tube is great but it's very very very limited in where it goes apart from the very center if London. Once you are outside zone 1 the gaps between stations and the "spokes" of the different lines becomes considerable.
How did people shop for groceries when your neighborhood was originally built? Surely it was not designed to be so inconvenient: what has changed in the meantime?
One popular way of talking about building for people is the concept of a "fifteen-minute city": neighborhoods where you can get to your daily needs within that much time via walking or biking. This does not require super-towers or any unusual level of density. My neighborhood - about ten years older than yours - comes close to the ideal, and while it has its share of apartment buildings, none are taller than half a dozen stories, and there are just as many people living in townhouses or single-family homes as there are in the apartments.
We don't have a metro station, but we do have an express bus line which will get you to a metro station in fifteen minutes, and that bus comes every five minutes. Not so bad.
No, there's not a shop on every corner - but there are two grocery stores within five minutes' walk, and two more within ten. No need to carry groceries on the bus at all.
Groceries might have been delivered. Also there were small food shops (butcher, grocer, fishmonger, baker) in every neighborhood that don't exist any more.
So would it be possible to bring those back, or at least a grocery store?
"15 Minute City" ideas sound nice on paper, but I think that in reality the research shows they are net-negative in basically everything apart from encouraging active-transport.
The main issue is around equity.
15 minute cities work great for high-paid knowledge workers with flexible schedules who can chose how and where they can work (i.e. laptop + wifi ... your typical HN reader perhaps). But this is not true for everyone - you cannot expect everyone to find employment within 15 minutes of their home (e.g. healthcare workers, factory workers, maintenance workers, security guards, farmers, construction workers etc etc are unlikely to e.g. find a factory within 15 mins of their house).
Making area support more active-transport (i.e. removing road space and replacing it with pedestrian and cycling space) also has the beneficial side-effect of making it nicer for people and thus more desirable. So property value and rents go up. And again, the high-paid knowledge workers and their families are fine, but the poorer and less well paid are priced out. The lower-income families have to move further out into lower-density areas where there is not enough density of population to support smaller grocery shops, pharmacies, etc so the 15 minute rule stops working and now they need to pay to run a car. And where you do retain roads for the essential transport needs (e.g. grocery deliveries, emergency services, garbage collection etc) you end up with the lower-income families living there since they are less desirable and cheaper and it is those who suffer from that the most (pollution, noise, safety etc)
If you remove roads of block access or removing parking etc to promote active-transport you also disproportionately impact those with accessibility problems. Not just "disabled people in wheelchairs" but also people who are not officially disabled but would benefit from driving, e.g. pregnant people, or elderly people who are fine but cannot walk distances regularly etc. 15 minute cities punish people who cannot easily walk or cycle unaided. Oh and ding ding ding yes these types people who have mobility issues also tend to be the poorer and lower-income people in society too.
Starting to notice a pattern here yet?
Basically the "15 Minute City" utopia is only for rich white-collar knowledge workers. It forces lower-income families and workers out of a neighborhood. I am undecided on if this is "working as intended" or not.
Which gaps? Unless you're outside zone six, you can get pretty much anywhere in London by tube or train within 20 minutes walking and if 20 minutes walking is too much for you then sure use the car, but traffic is so heavy in London that plenty of people just train.
Worth noting a 20 minute walk is a ~5 minute bike ride. I live a 20 minute walk from my local train station and when I can't ride a bike (which is rare, but happens for one reason or another) it's pretty annoying.
I don't know. I have been living in south of Spain for the last 7 years, buildings aren't high rises yet in the 2 neighborhood I have lived in I had most of the commodities available.
Right now I live in a residencial bmneighborhood, not a city center and I have in a 5 min walking distance general, groceries , 2 pharmacies, veterinary, vegetables, butcher, fast food (roasted chicken, burgers, kebab), stationery shop, physiotherapist, 2 small chinese "sell anything" shops (basically aliexpress at your door), a swimming pool + multisport area (soccer, paddle, basketball + others), several hairdresser and nail/beauty shop, a shop selling hicking goods, one selling mattresses, a car bodywork shop, a general mechanic car shop, a gambling joint, primary and secondary school and 2 english schools, some place with activities for older people, a park to walk the dogs and several playgrounds.
A 10min longer walk distance and I have 4 other groceries supermarkets, lots of other smaller shops/specialties. The closest cinema is a 10min ride in a bus or bicycle, city center ~20min. Closest airport is a 15min car ride.
I ride my bicycles 10 minutes and I am in the woods in a natural park where I can only hear birds.
It doesn't seem that hard to replicate. I am pretty sure the main issue in some places are some sort of zoning laws that prevent commercial areas to be rented in otherwise residencial neighborhoods.
That's close but not quite right. I understand exactly how necessary cars are for most people, having spent many years trapped in a car-dependent life myself, and I am so glad to have escaped from it that I want to do everything I can to liberate others. A walkable urban life should not be an expensive luxury - there is no fundamental economic reason for it. The scarcity is entirely a function of policy, primarily restrictive zoning codes, and we can fix that.
Yeah so the walkable cities evangelism wants everyone to be able to have that.
In Dublin, we periodically pedestrianise a street or two. And there is much angst about “oh, but the businesses”. And inevitably a year or so on the businesses on the street are busier than they ever were.
Really makes you wonder why businesses hate having customers. Or are the businesses separate from the group that's complaining about businesses?
I remember thinking "why the hell are cars allowed on Capel street?" the whole time I lived there. Delighted they finally fixed it.
Light rail, busses, bikes.
The US might be terminally carbrained but if you design infrastructure for walkability it is fantastic, much more convenient (parking is awful, carparks are awful), and cheaper.
The sell is downtown brooklyn and its a good sell and would be nice. Convenience, density, transit access, some of the best in the world.
The rub is nyc can’t even do that anymore. How many subway lines came up before 1940 and how many after? What has population growth been like since 1940? All bad on all counts.
We can articulate the solution but we can’t deliver it. Unless you already have this lifestyle you won’t get it. You have to move to where it already is. You can’t expect it to be built for yourself.
That works if people live within walking distance of the high street. Do they? No, they don't.
First pic in the article is a pedestrian street without cars. Not sure it's fixed anything.
While we're at it, let's regress to the 10th century.
Oxford city center is extremely pedestrian friendly and yet it's also experienced this trend in the last 10 years. I don't think your comment is actually engaging seriously with what's been happening.
I've only briefly been to Oxford, but it felt like all of the nice places were locked inside the Westgate?
In general, it seems as if Oxford City Center is just too big: it can't sustain all of it, and people gravitate towards the nicer part, which is the Westgate.
A lot of those companies are tax dodges or money laundering. They are the only ones that can afford to pay the landlords and the mad council rates.
Councils trying to extract as money as possible from shoppers via parking companies doesn't help either.
What, have the gambling shops fallen to their online rivals? They were really dominating last I visited, which is admittedly some 8-10 years ago.
But yeah, UK main streets have a problem.
Most of UK is surprisingly poor so of course there are no nice shops. Duh!
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
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.
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
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)
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.
>This’ll cheer you up: Northampton is used as a case study for a successful post-industrial town.
That same bent of evil people came to my town to peddle some "looks good from my ivory tower" type municipal trash policy that incentivize all the wrong things. They cited an adjacent town that adopted their stuff and is renown locally for its filth as a "success story". The public's reaction was literally "hahahaha, oh wait you're serious, hahahahahahahahahah". City councilor literally had to bang the gavel a bunch and tell the crowd to be serious. It was glorious. The city council is not likely to adopt it at this point.
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.
As a frenchman living in London for 10y+, I am always shocked when I go to medium sized cities in the UK. I love the country side though. Joke is that UK is a third world country bolted onto London, obviously exaggerated but if you look at numbers and you go there yourselves there is some truth in it.
UK's high streets really are depressing.
More than half of the shops are retail chains with stupidly bright colors that clash with the local architecture. The other half is cheap-looking stores and bad restaurants.
To illustrate my point, I picked a random town center on google maps:
https://www.google.com/maps/@52.5494903,0.0881482,5a,55.8y,2...
This has a costa coffee, a subway, a ladbroke, a betfred, a bright vape shop, a haart real estate agency, a bunch of hair salons, etc.
To be fair, this town has also a number of local shops that look decent. But overall the aesthetics of it is highly depressing to me.
Look at the triovet clinic, this is a local place that wants to look like a national chain.
I agree and your point on Google is not even that bad compared to most places.
I wish cities would treat high streets as public commons, rather than particularly valuable private real estate. Landlords are just looking to make the most rent possible and don't particularly care whether their tenants have positive utility for the community or not. Similarly, landlords have no problem keeping store fronts empty because they are holding out for a high paying tenant and have certain tax advantages.
I live in a little community outside Boulder, and we have a nice little main street area, only a few blocks, which is a good size for our community. There's a few restaurants, a cafe, a community space, some boutiques, all of which encourage foot traffic and liveliness. But recently, a little book shop devoted to kids books was forced out due to increased rent demands, and an architecture firm moved in. What was previously drawing maybe 100+ people a day to the main street now attracts 5 employees who work in a closed office. Not the end of the world for the main street, but if a few more shops make a similar decision it will be completely dead.
Our country has been sold off and scammed off. You don't understand the level of anger brewing. It's the same story across Europe and America.
People don't understand the scams but they smell it. They know how they remember things and they know that everything is getting worse not better.
I dare our governments to try and draft us into another war, literally dare them, even a war to defend our actual land - people have nothing to fight for and will turn their weapons on perceived perpetrators. It's brewing. This slow decline is painfully visible to people.
> Our country has been sold off and scammed off
> People don't understand the scams but they smell it.
This is so so true and well put
With 13% vacancy rate it's most certainly just very marginal businesses that stayed, so rents must be dirt cheap by now. Anything over 10-12% signals oversupply and it's a race to the bottom for landlords. Whatever it is, landlords are not to blame.
People just don't want to walk around places when they can drive and buy everything in one place.
"They do it because they can", this is the best explanation in so many cases, this not the exception.
My favorite Bankster(retired), has single handedly turned the main st in a small town here in Nova Scotia around, there were others holding on, and some trying, but her very accute targeting of interests and providing those services as loss leaders has drawn people back, and all the store fronts are occupied, and the vape shop is at the end of the strip. The activity is high enough that some of the older established business interests were forced to leave there just out of town tax havens and grab a spot down town,while the grabbing was good.
That's a very interesting story. Is there any public reporting on this? I would be curious to read more.
Those shops are money laundering vehicles. Meaning: they are subsidized by cash from illegal activities and without that they'd be unprofitable as well, leaving high streets empty.
Hey how else are you going to launder dirty money.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
There's some truth to this. Compliance costs can be huge, particularly if you're dealing with anything that's toxic or dangerous. I worked at small electronics manufacturer in the 90s that spent an incredible amount of money making sure the area they washed the circuit boards with alcohol was up to code and all the paperwork was filled out properly. We didn't have anybody working there who even knew what the rules were.
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.
Part of the problem is that there's not really a way to ensure brick-and-mortar captures its value-add. It costs a lot of money to rent and staff the space, and there are real benefits to being able to browse in a real space (depending on the store in question, they can offer curation, close examination of the product, the sales staff can sometimes offer valuable suggestions or opinions, you can try on clothes, you can check compatibility of some products directly in the store or get a sense of how they actually look), but nothing but friction or a vague sense of guilt prevents a customer from using the store to choose a product, for free, and then ordering it for cheaper online, which completely screws over the physical location.
Possible solutions to this include 1. More stores introduce a paid membership. This is not a bad idea, a store pays for the cost of the physical location with the membership fee and has similar prices to online stores, and they have an incentive to maintain product quality, Costco is very successful with this model, but I'd be worried that that the model is begging for enshitiffication, you could really cash out on the store's reputation by lowering the product quality and increasing the costs and relying on the friction of the existing membership to keep customers for a fair while. 2. Stores focus on being an enjoyable experience, and hope that if you're spending enough time there, you're going to want to buy something. This is what Barnes and Nobles is doing, and most surviving malls. 3. Some sort of policy fix. I'd be in favor of an online shopping "tariff" designed to bring online prices in line with what it costs to run physical locations, collected by the feds and redistributed to localities. Has the minor downside that everyone but me would hate it, and it would be so monstrously unpopular that it could never happen. If we could figure out a way around that, though, it could be quite good.
Instead of a tariff, shipping cost could be separated from good cost. Further separate the shipper and require competition.
There are still goods that are primarily bought in person, hazardous and large where shipping is prohibitive.
The memberships idea suffers from the same problem we have on the internet -- nobody wants to manage a dozen different memberships in order to go shopping. They'll just use Amazon instead.
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...)
Charity shops actually get pretty decent footfall at least in my experience (but maybe that's just where I live). More than that they have a few structural advantages other than tax breaks which means they are able to compete where traditional retail can't - things like low staffing costs (if they use volunteers), no/very low inventory cost, and they are usually able/willing to sign up to lease terms which more commercial enterprises would either struggle to secure, or would be unable to live with (eg almost no security of tenure).
> raw leather and leatherwork tools
You expect retail outlets for that? 30 years ago when I was making my own shoes in London and wanted to buy hide I had to trail around grimy industrial areas to visit a wholesale warehouse and persuade them to do retail for a moment. (I bought my tools from other hobbyists.)
This. People forget how much more stuff was niche or industrial/b2b only before ecommerce came along.
Industrial businesses were less rigid about avoiding retail sales than today but it was still way more hassle and generally "the dark ages" comparatively.
Agreed. It's a whole lot easier to engage in esoteric hobbies these days, because there just has to be a single warehouse somewhere, maybe even in another country, willing to sell you what you need.
Periodically I watch YouTube videos made by a historian of clothing. She makes a lot of clothing for research and display, and she had an episode on where to purchase linen and what to look for to make sure you don't get a sub-par product. When I was growing up you just wouldn't have been able do something like that unless you were living somewhere like Paris or Milan.
It’s that way in some places in the US and I’m pretty sure local businesses aren’t taxed to death.
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.
"just stop your crying, it's a sign of the times" Harry Styles
Also bookies and barbers.
I have a running game with my husband wherever we visit somewhere new - what are there more of, barbers or nail salons? It's usually a close competition but there's always quite a few of each
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.
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.
Given the choice between the shopping center with convenient parking and taking the bus downtown, the shopping center still wins.
This is in London, not in the main center but about halfway out. Many of the original towns and villages still kinda-exist to a certain extent (but obviously the gaps have been filled with urban sprawl) so there are lots of smaller "high streets" dotted throughout, typically near tube stations etc.
£1.85 each ride. So £3.70 round-trip if you can do it in just two rides. There are discounts if you are quick (e.g. you might only pay once) but it is time dependent.
Or just drive directly and quickly with zero hassle for pennies of electricity and free parking in a shopping center.
Yes I think that was parking cost not bus cost they were talking about (buses can be expensive for short journeys but the cost usually doesn't rise that much for longer ones in my recent experience - I paid £3 for a 40 min journey last week. But bus fares were capped at £2 for ages so I don't have a good feel now for what they cost).
Parking in premium areas can certainly be £5 an hour - but that really will be for premium areas with few spots and high demand, although that's a common situation in historic town centres. I wouldn't be mad enough to try and park in London but I'd expect parking there to be through the roof. The places I usually park for shopping etc (outside London but still SE) are more like £1 an hour in town centres, or free when the car park belongs to a shop or is in a less on-demand area.
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.
What do you mean no major reduction? You used to be able to park for free to pop into a shop to quickly grab something, now you have to pay high rates via another different app that you need to install and register your card on before you can even pay and you are fined automatically via CCTV if you run out of time or don't register and pay quickly enough. That did not happen a few decades ago.
Or just go to a supermarket or shopping center where parking is free and easy and you are not being preyed on by parking companies trying dark patterns to fine you.
That is not the case where I live but the shops are not doing well.
That city is notorious
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
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.
I'm European, so it's a second hand like Dutch Kringloop?
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.
Yes, Kringloop, Charity Shop, Sally Ann (Salvation Army) in the US, all similar things.
Aka "Op shop" for the Aussies & Kiwis.
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?
Thrift store. Like Goodwill.
Others have mentioned in a separate thread, but it is a thrift shop operated by a charity.
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.
Ah a thrift store.
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)
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_pastor
> That's called shwarma
What, the elephant leg? In the UK it's mostly Doner - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doner_kebab
And doner kebabs on sale in kebab shops in the UK are of very dubious origin. There have been a variety of scandals over the years about the origins of the meat.
About 20 years ago I read an article in the metro newspaper about the origins of the meat, a study having been done, which found that most kebab meat in the UK was not what it said it was. A significant proportion contained a mix of lamb, beef, pork and unknown meats. And at that time most of the allegedly 'halal' doners on the market contained pork.
Recently one of the UK's biggest suppliers of kebab meat was fined for selling doner meat that advertised 87% lamb, but was found to be using large quantities of fat and skin, with meat making up between 10 and 50% depending on which source you read. The 'meat' itself, where it was even from sheep was largely neck trim and mutton trim, and they were using goat as well without labelling it - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy736xme2vvo
Maybe you found some good places in east London that were actually making their shawarma on-site. But the standard of a generic 'kebab' in the UK has always been known to be awful.
Another Brit that moved to Oz. I 100% agree!
Take away kebab shops are the very bottom of the market for the most part.
If you want quality Turkish kebabs which are nicely cooked, generally identifiable and not swimming in grease you go to a Turkish barbecue grill restaurant.
I don't know how long you've been away but they're everywhere here now with not an elephant leg in sight. They'll even serve you a nice salad with bulgur wheat.
It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK if that's what you are looking for or that you can't buy terrible food in other countries such as Australia too.
About five years, I don’t believe for a second the market has changed that much across the country in that time.
Yes, you can get good Turkish food in a lot of places, and good Turkish food is delicious.
But the post I was responding to called out kebab shops in particular as excellent and I wouldn’t want people thinking they can get ‘good’ food in the average high-street kebab place.
Don’t get me wrong, it hits the spot after a skinful… but high-quality it is not. See my sibling post about the various meat-scandals.
> It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK if that's what you are looking for.
Just as well I said nothing of the sort then eh?
> Just as well I said nothing of the sort then eh?
I think you did.
I think you've presented criminal behaviour as if it's not an aberration.
You've ignored that there are good kebab shops and bad. That good high street kebab shops are common and sell more than just low quality donnas, including shish with fresh salad.
I never want to eat a donna kebab, so I don't order it.
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.
Did you ever spend time in East London? Absolutely top notch kebabs.
I mostly lived in East London
Are they really excellent? Kebab shops elsewhere in Europe are often associated with shady dealings. For example, in Finland a family will run one for a while for immigration fraud (while also dodging taxes), then hand it on to another immigrant family for rinse and repeat. Naturally, they serve the lowest-quality food they can get away with. In Poland many are owned by a mafia using exploited Bangladeshi labour to operate them with zero concern for food quality.
Modern döner-kebab meat is rarely the quality shawarma of a century ago. It is highly processed and basically a big hot dog.
Yes, they are really excellent.
> Kebab shops elsewhere in Europe are often associated with shady dealings.
No they are not, but there's a lot of racist propaganda that says they are!
The press coverage and statements by police and tax officials are there for you to read. To get you started, here's one [0] from Finland's public broadcaster that is hardly a bastion of "racist propaganda".
[0] https://yle.fi/a/74-20191372
I mean that absolutely reads as racist propaganda!
> "All types of misconduct are clearly more common in foreign-owned companies,"
Spare me, anywhere with bankers hanging out is going to be an endless sea of far more serious crime.
None of this has anything to do with food quality anyway, which was my point.
The quote was from Finland tax authority. Are you saying they are racist?
> anywhere with bankers hanging out is going to be an endless sea of far more serious crime.
In Finland? Examples?
Kebab stores, local entrepreneurs unwilling to hire a local and pay EUR 1500, private universities, slumlords. That's how immigration and visa frauds operate in Poland, yes. Then immigration and visa fraud is only on the surface, behind there is likely some more serious organized crime.
Are you saying a hot dog flame kissed and scraped off with a knife and dumped into a pita with some yogurt/garlic/mayo/what have you sauce would not be delicious? Come on. People outside the US act all high and proud about the hot dog but literally every meat eating culture has some other scrap meat dish, sometimes its the whole anus rather than minced and put in a casing for you. Waste of the animal to throw out fine meat if prepared well.
Cultures may have traditional offal-based dishes, and indeed they can be delicious, but the meat is not highly processed, because that is something that came about only with modern industry. Just compare a photo of a hot dog or döner-roll mystery meat to one of those traditional dishes.
> Mercer says a part of town filled with ethnic minority shops and restaurants has been disparaged by some as “a foreign bazaar”. “Would they prefer the shops were empty? It’s much better to have busy shops, but people don’t like change.”
No, it's that I don't like the council and central government turning a blind eye to obvious crime fronts because they're desperate for the tax. Don't call me a bigot or xenophobe.
I would prefer them to be knocked down for housing frankly, as many town centres are close to useful train stations. The council can then use the council tax
Councils are supporting the don't build any housing any where mandate. It is such an obvious use of the land it's crazy. We still have to delusionally play along with ideas about how to "regenerate the high street".
Case in point. Huddersfield is currently "regenerating" its town borrowing huge sums for a new library and new markets etc instead of just flattening the town and replacing it with housing. The railway line is also having a major upgrade. The timing is literally perfect. Another own goal. But hey a lot of employment was generated and I'm sure the mandate to employ local didn't mean a lot of backhanders....
People will move to a shithole if it has good transport links to jobs, which Huddersfield has. Look at Romford for example. The council has sold off loads of land for flats and is selling more. All because of the new Elizabeth Line
Guess what the result is when 10,000s people with good jobs move in to an area? Demand for shops and services!
You have to understand that most people are emotional animals rather than rational students of economics. These are ultimately the lines of reasoning that steer our governments, vs those of rational students of economics.
Not sure about how to get out of this pickle. So many modern problems stem from the crash of our prehistory behavioral adaptions against new context brought on by civilization and technology, which now moves faster than we could actually adapt through natural selection.
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?
as opposed to the noble business of peddling shit from Chinese sweatshops at four digit markup?
False dichotomy
It's not an addiction. I take breaks all the time because I get bored. Like breaks of 2+ months.
Thats funny how journalists ignore elphant in the room; UK non-domicile (non-dom) tax regime was officially abolished on April 6, 2025.
So a lot of high-earners would now have to pay UK taxes on worldwide income. So they left the country or only stay there mininal amount of days to not be considered resident.
Many high street businesses were working for these people with tons of disposable income.
Also criminal situation was little better when these high-profile people were roaming London streets. No one wanted something happen to them.
Would abolishing non-dom have much of an effect on Rotherham, though? Don't think there were too many high earners there.
Oh yeah mate, I'm sure Rotherham high street has been blighted an outflow of non-doms.
Poundland[1] is going under as high net worth customers switch their purchases of multipack Wagonwheels to Dubai. ;)
This is just nonsense. If out of town retail parks are still flourishing then it's not a lack of consumer demand; it's price and convenience that matters.
1. Poundland is actually going under because a US private equity fund, Gordon Brothers, spied an opportunity to asset strip them by pretending to offer investment.
They were gifted the business for a nominal £1 and have refused all offers of a buyout that would keep Poundland afloat.