The Death Throes of the High Street? – Part 2

The attack on the high street retailer

Since the 1980s local councils and planning departments have allegedly been working to improve shoppers’ experiences in the centres of their towns and cities. To this end they have virtually banned the car from the ‘High Street’ area, by a combination of ‘redevelopment’, shopping malls, pedestrianisation and many with ‘park and ride’ services.

Sounds great on paper, including the ‘artist impressions’ illustrations that we see on public planning information, with happy looking people enjoying a cappuccino at an outdoor café table. However the reality is a little different.

What of the person who wants to ‘pop into’ town for a few things? This is no longer possible, no more parking for half an hour near the deli or butchers that you might have used for years, picking up the dry-cleaning and a newspaper. These regular local customers provided the ‘bread-and-butter’ trade for so many local specialists and traders. Instead, the process of getting into town alone takes half an hour of negotiation of traffic lights and traffic calming measures, then there’s the pay and display, often situated 15 minutes walk from where you want to go and costs an outrageous amount or park and ride (which adds at least an hour in itself).

Ever increasing business rates in town centres together with an often increasingly heavy burden of legislative requirements have made survival, let alone success impossibility for the small, specialist or family business.

City and town centres have become the domain of larger national chains, including café and fast food offerings. Increasingly, fewer of the larger chains remain, and the city centres are becoming populated at best by M&S, Next and Starbucks together with others who can stand the high rates and can still make a profit under pressure of recession due to their strong well established brands, or at worst by charity shops and boarded-up windows.

Many of the national chains have reacted by duplicating or completely moving their stores to out-of-town shopping centres and abandoning the town and city centres that had been the trading centres of these locations for a hundred years.

The new out-of-town enterprise zones were a success from the start. Initially a novelty, each one growing and drawing more and more shoppers with their super-stores, discount centres and designer outlets; huge free car parks and drive through fast-food to the point they are now a ‘destination’ and over-congested by traffic and their own success.

Then along came online shopping. No travelling, no speed cameras, no parking problems, no congestion, no delays, no queues at the checkout (well not very often anyway – Next had to put in an online queuing system for their checkout during the Christmas 2009 sale so high was demand on their website) and no waiting in traffic to get home.

Now that 90% of the UK has access to broadband, (even though only 60% actually do) and with laptop computers readily available for just a few hundred pounds, many of the barriers to home computing, now overcome, open the floodgates for online shopping. It would be nice if the broadband were faster and available all over country, for the consumer to have easier to use software and websites, but it’s still better than negotiating busy towns or shopping centres

Let’s look at the example young mother (or of course father) with two small children who needs to buy their weekly groceries.

We asked lots of people in this type of situation, so that the scenario below is representative of an average or typically common experience of the difficulties that arise.

The eldest child is aged 4 and a baby of 9 months. Their car is parked on the street, and as the parking is quite busy at times, then it is not always possible to park directly outside the house.

They usually go to a large supermarket in the out-of-town shopping centre around 6 miles away. So she has to get the two children ready, load the car and set off to the supermarket. If the car is not immediately outside the house, then what are the difficult logistics of this? It seems unavoidable, yet unacceptable to leave the children alone at some point as it is probably not physically possible to negotiate a toddler, a baby, and all the paraphernalia required to a car in one go, so what is done first? Of course there will soon be the requisite shopping bags to add to the list as supermarkets are under pressure to reduce the number used and those who still give bags will soon be charging.

Practically everyone who I asked who has small children said that getting them dressed and organised, remembering everything, dealing with every detail and difficulty can take an hour, and this can often be a very stressful one!

She sets off in the car after resolving this problem and heads to the supermarket. As it is the weekend, when she gets there the car park is quite full, so finding a mother and child car parking place is not easy, she knows that without the extra space alongside the car to get the baby and child out of their restraining seats and safely into a trolley the likelihood of damaging her or the next car in the car park are highly likely, and insurance is expensive enough already.

Now she needs a suitable trolley to hold the two children. Another logistics problem, does she lock the children in the car while getting a trolley, or get them out and carry them to the trolley bay? And now it’s starting to rain.

Lots of parents we spoke to said that sometimes this is simply not physically possible let alone safe.

Once into the shop the 4 year old is refusing to stay in the trolley seat, he wants to get out and walk. Worn down by the fuss and tantrum that is building up, she lifts him out of the trolley to be immediately faced with a new problem, keeping up with him and making sure he does not disappear and get lost or worse. She wishes that she had remembered to bring the child reins or wrist link, but he hates it and it just makes life even harder so she only uses it when walking in traffic.

After negotiating the aisles, trying to remember everything – goodness knows where the list went in all the chaos of trying to get everyone into and out of the car - she finally gets to the checkout to pay for her weekly shop, and joins a long queue. The baby is bored and hungry now, and fed up of sitting in the trolley, she is reaching for the goods piled up on the belt (someone else’s shopping) and has succeeded in grabbing a multipack of crisps which she proceeds to shake and squeeze into dust. Now embarrassed, she has a dilemma where she cannot offer to go and get a replacement for the shopper in front, even though it is her fault and she knows it, eventually she manages to get a harassed shop-floor supervisor whom after some confusion about whether she wants the crisps or why the replacement is needed, gets a replacement for the shopper in front of her.

Finally, her shopping is paid for, the checkout operator thankfully helped her with the packing, but still the little boy will not get back into the trolley seat and now it is really raining as they head for the car, negotiating the hazards of the car park where drivers now have a combination of increased motivation to park near the door with reduced visibility.

Again there is the dilemma of getting the children and into the car and now laden with shopping in the now pouring rain, and someone’s parked a van really close to the passenger side of the car where the baby’s seat is located, now she has to struggle to get her in across the width of the car, hurting her back in the process. What’s more, she can’t let her little boy climb into his seat first or she wouldn’t have the room to be able to strap in the baby (which she normally does from the passenger side. He is not happy and has started screaming and shouting, passers-by are looking and her stress levels are reaching maximum levels for today. At last everything is in and they can head for home.

Its all taken much longer than expected so now they are in the traffic at the busiest time of day, the children are hungry and complaining, the car is misted up and she is trying not to think about whether any significant damage was done to the car door that bumped the car next to her as her little boy climbed in. Her headache is mounting and exhaustion is mounting, and she has to make an overdue lunch as soon as she gets home.

When they get back, there is nowhere to park near the house, so the whole palaver has to be carried out in reverse, the children taken into the house, then the shopping in numerous trips, and between visits to the car, her little boy manages to pull one of the bags of shopping off the table, smashing a glass jar of mayonnaise in the process.

As many of the people we talked to, the whole experience is time consuming and can be stressful and exhausting, often taking 3 or 4 hours (and feeling much longer) from start to finish.

What is the alternative for our young (or not so young) mother (or father)?
Use those 4 precious weekend hours to have quality time with the children. One evening in the week, after they have been put to bed at night, make a cup of tea, or even better, pour a nice glass of wine and go online. Order the groceries and other requirements, pay online on one of the many supermarket websites and a few days later a nice person from the supermarket will come along and put the groceries inside the front door. All that is now left to do is put them into the cupboards while the children are playing, happy and safe where they can be kept under a watchful eye.

The next article will look at what the business case for get on a level playing field and start building business online – reaching a wider audience that could only be dreamt of before.