Which closed high street shops do you miss most?

The only way to save the High Street, is to even the playing field with internet shopping so they can compete fairly.

We all know you can buy things cheaper on the internet. But do you know who you are trading with?

I check out unknown sellers before I buy from them. I often uncover a multitude of company names, selling the same products at different prices on different websites, all using the same virtual office address, registered in another country to avoid UK taxes. I have found addresses that don’t exist. A property that no longer exists in the middle of a road?, you can bet there will be businesses using it.

The first thing I do, is a search of the ‘company name’. Then I google the address and check where it is on Google Maps. If I can see a building with the company name on I can be fairly confident I am dealing with a real company. If I see what looks like a virtual office, delving further will probably uncover a seller with a multitude of what looks like small businesses. Registered names attached to these companies often have slightly different spellings to look like different people.

Many of these ‘small businesses’ are not registered for VAT. Many that are, register out of the UK, Luxembourg often comes up. Why should other countries benefit from taxes that should be paid to our government? Taxes that are needed for OUR vital services like the NHS, roads, the police.

Amazon and eBay are rife with these types of traders. Having your own website is much cheaper these days, so many of these traders will have separate websites for each of their ‘companies’.

A legitimate company will sell £100,000 worth of goods and be taxed accordingly. A trader with 20 companies selling £50,000 worth of goods each could be paying virtually nothing as they will be below the VAT threshold and claiming expenses on each one separately. Paying next to nothing in taxes enables them to undercut the competition.

Traders with multiple websites often sell the same item at different prices. Why? To get you to believe you are getting a bargain on one site or are they nearing their limit on other sites?

And they are killing off our High Streets.

Do virtual offices have to inform authorities what businesses are registered with them? If not, they should.

Stop traders using multiple names, make them accountable. I have said before the name at the top should be on all branches of a business so we know who we are dealing with. If they are trading in the UK, then they should be paying taxes in the UK.

I miss many shops. I like to look and examine products before I buy, but I am slowly joining the couch-potato shoppers as things I want are just no longer available on the High Street. Politicians should have looked into this a long time ago, and I do hope they come up with a solution to save what is left of our bricks and mortar stores.

Then there is Amazon………..

I prefer buying from shops where I have the opportunity to see goods. I’m not keen on Argos but at least it is easy to take goods back if there is a problem. Positive comments about John Lewis and other shops don’t help me because there is no local branch.

It surprises me that Halfords has managed to keep so many stores open. The last twice I visited I was the only customer in the local store, which is conveniently close to the supermarket I use regularly. That reminds me very much of the nearest Maplin store, which closed when the company went into administration. I would miss Halfords for odds and ends, such as the puncture repair kit I bought recently.

I agree with Alfa that action is needed to prevent online businesses gaining an unfair advantage over those companies that do trade responsibly.

As the saying goes use it or lose it, with the fall in customers using bricks and mortar stores the rising costs of business rates and employing staff it doesn’t make economical sense to stay on the high street.

Everyone likes a bargain but if the majority of people keep buying through the internet then they only have themselves to blame when all of the shops disappear. If you ask the majority of those who say they miss the big stores when did they last go in and make a purchase they probably can’t remember as they have been ordering online as it is more convenient.

If we lose the high street shops this will put a large number of people on the dole queue which means a reduced tax income for the government so less money available for the maintenance of important infrastructure such as the NHS and social projects.

So buying through the internet actually does more damage to the country’s finances just so that you can save ten quid on a purchase.

It’s partly self inflicted misery by the consumer and sky high overheads for the retail shops and the government have been warned enough times over recent years but chose to ignore it until now because suddenly the exchequer is going to suffer with the loss of income.

Typical of politicians they have left it to the last minute and by the time they have finished pontificating and coming up with useless ideas it will be too late.

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It’s a pity that John Lewis and Waitrose have joined the companies that are struggling: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/27/john-lewis-to-close-five-waitrose-stores-after-warning-on-profits

Is a rebranding exercise a good idea if a company is struggling? I don’t know but there have been examples where this has not helped.

I recognise that high street, Melanie. I have known it from the 1950’s onwards and it has been forever changing. I had relatives in the area and it was a good place to go shopping and out for a treat.

Book-ended by two UndergrounD stations and with a railway station in the middle of the High Road connecting to the City, the East End and the docks, the shopping centre was extremely accessible. There were plenty of bus and trolleybus routes to the surrrounding suburbs plus a frequent bus service to Southend via Ilford and other Essex towns. There was also a long distance Green Line coach service from Hertford to Guildford via central London. There were daily coach services to Clacton-on-Sea and other home counties towns that stopped en route to pick up and set down passengers.

As well as BHS, M&S and Woolworths there was a large department store [Bartons] and a sprawling branch of the London Cooperative Society which sold almost everything except food [it had local shops for that].

There was a large theatre [Empire] which later became a TV studio for ATV, a large cinema/theatre, a dance hall, two smaller cinemas on the periphery, a large pub at each end and in the middle, a garden centre, and a stall market plus dozens of barrows in the side streets. There were a number of tea shops, and cafes, numerous tailors [Dunn & Co, John Collier, Weaver to Wearer, Burton, Alexandre, plus several local tailors and outfitters] and about a dozen shoe shops [K Shoes, Freeman Hardy & Willis, Saxone, Manfield, Dolcis, Barratts, Clarks, etc].

Among the products sold by separate shops were electrical appliances and fittings [every light-bulb tested before sale!], homewares, hardware, ironmongery, corsetry, hosiery, millinery, bridal outfits, jewellery, drapery & bed linens, knitting wool, furniture, carpeting & lino, wallpaper & decorating materials, sports goods, bicycles, musical instruments & sheet music, gramophone records, stationery, confectionery, timber, and coal.

For food there was a large original Sainsbury’s with separate counters for each commodity, International Stores, David Greig, and UK Tea Co, and several greengrocers and fruiterers. Not far away there was an open-fronted shop that only sold eggs.

There were the branches of five banks, branches of the Halifax and Abbey National building societies, plus three estate agents which acted as agents for other building societies. There was also a gas showroom and an electricity showroom and later a British Telecom shop. There were three chemists [pharmacies] – Boots and two independents – plus just one ladies hairdresser and one barber’s [with seven chairs all in use daily, a bookies runner, and a cabinet of requisites for the weekend!].

There was hardly anything that could not be bought or ordered from a specialist supplier plus the variety offered by the large stores.

Reflecting the traditions of the times, the only take-away was a fish & chips shop but there was nowhere to buy a sandwich or a beaker of coffee. The only places to buy plimsolls or gym shoes and kit was a solitary sportswear shop that also sold football boots and balls, tennis balls and rackets, cricket gear, and boxing gloves. For fishing tackle and bait you had to go east to other places.

To provide relief, there were three public toilet establishments with commodious facilities and attendants on hand.

Over the years traders came and went as tastes and fashions changed. In the 1960’s television rental shops appeared and later disappeared. Habitat had a smart modern store for a few years. Record shops came and went, a rash of travel agents took up vacant shops, and eventually the out-of-town malls and sheds, and then the internet, took their toll, so now it is but a shadow of its former self. Woolworths went [replaced after it moved to the mall first by C&A and then by Wilko], M&S vacated their upper sales floor and reduced the size of their food hall, BHS had its day, and the burger chains, takeaways and phone shops have filled some of the gaps in the frontages. On my occasional visits the high street still seems to be busy but it is a very different experience now.

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