The 'death of the High Street'

Lots of articles are being written about the 'death of the High Street'. I'm not sure it's started to affect us in (Central and Inner) London that strongly yet, as the population density is currently so high, but there are plenty of places where it is keenly felt.

Many of the articles are about chains closing shops--in cycling, we have the threat of a lot of Evans shops closing, or here's one about M&S.

I personally don't care too much about the High Street that's full of shops tied to chains, and again, in London we're lucky to still have large numbers of independent shops, but there are plenty of places where the High Street has long been more heavily dominated by chains, and when they go, it may take a long time, if it happens at all, for independent shops to establish themselves.

The main threat for the High Street is today seen as distributors like Amazon, loss-making enterprises undercutting local businesses through their web-sites, backed by long-term venture capital riding on destroying locally-base competition and reducing the workforce by means of robot technology--both on the warehouse floor and, perhaps, although this is by no means certain to happen, delivery by drone (seen as viable in rural areas and impossible in urban environments). I think both of these aims are extremely objectionable and I vastly prefer going to shops and buying things there in person.

However, I think the main threat to High Streets is still the same as it has been for a long time, only in new clothes--artifically suppressed transport costs. Decades ago, this was the cause of 'out of town' shopping centres springing up in green fields, externalising transport costs to those who drove there and subsidised the business with their fuel. If the cost of driving reflected the true cost, this wouldn't have happened. Needless to say, mail order, of which on-line ordering is merely the slightly modernised version, is nothing new, either. It doesn't get much more 'out of town' than processing orders via a web-site and then having stuff trucked to all the corners of the country, again exploiting transport costs kept artificially low by various political tendencies.

It's been variously asked if the High Street was ever a good thing in the first place and whether we shouldn't just 'embrace change' and get used to the new normal--e.g., say goodbye to the traditional model of predominantly goods being sold there and replace that with services. As I said above, I don't think chain shops are necessarily a good thing, but the concept of the market place/bazaar/high street etc. is ancient for a reason, because it's a good concept--a mixture of private and public businesses accessed, importantly, unlike in a 'shopping mall', via the public realm or something close to it (as in the large London markets, for instance). This creates places in towns where people come together and has historically been one of the defining characteristics of what distinguished towns from villages (and in fact 'elevated' many villages into towns). I think it's very important for the High Street to survive and I doubt very much that the current actions of the aforementioned long-term investors are benign--we already see some of the instability developing that comes from people being out of secure work because they're 'replaced' by machines, surviving instead on a meagre diet of unreliable and/or infrequent 'gigs', and I think this can only get worse.

Anyway, plenty to discuss around that.