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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
..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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
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?
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?
..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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
How pathetic to be unable to survive without depending on a car.
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.
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.
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.
"just stop your crying, it's a sign of the times" Harry Styles
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Hope you get stabbed later today.
So you get to enjoy the cuktural enrichment you jihadist advocate for.
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.
That city is notorious
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
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)
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.