When I heard the news that Asos had bought out Topshop (and by extension Topman and Miss Selfridge), it suddenly began to dawn on me … Oxford Street is going to have a gaping hole. More seriously, it is indicative of the profound changes our high streets are destined to experience in the next few months and years. This was following Boohoo’s acquisition of the struggling department store Debenhams. That same online fashion retailer is set to buy the remnants of the Arcadia group (Dorothy Perkins, Burton and Wallis) in the next week or so.
While this flood of retailers sliding into insolvency may seem like a direct result of the global pandemic, I believe it has merely acted as a catalyst to the inevitable. Before March 2020, the Arcadia group was on its last legs and so was Debenhams. The country-wide lockdowns have acted as a straw on the backs of these high street titans.
This change in the high street landscape, once we can return to the shops of course, may be more complex than it appears. It is simple to jump to conclusions like brick and mortar is dead, click and order is the future, or that Britain’s high streets will descend into a spiral of privation which ends in an exponential rise in betting shops. I have hope (this could be synonymous with naïve optimism) that the dire situation our high streets find themselves in right now could lead to a rejuvenation and a burgeoning of new and exciting business models.
One thing is undeniable: fashion retailers with an online presence are thriving (especially if they are exclusively online). Shopping is no longer a Saturday afternoon pastime with family and friends, but rather a lonely activity done in one’s room most likely at night whilst double screening (a rather pitiful image). With the inability to venture outside, people are becoming accustomed to taking gambles on clothes that they are not sure will fit and estranged from the notion of a fitting room. This shift in attitudes will lead, as already illustrated, to a decline in the presence of the traditional fashion retailers and department stores on our high streets.
Then, there is the matter of conscious decisions. Landlords could continue to charge the same rent that this fashion retailer could no longer pay: Desolate and grey boarded up shop windows are commonplace on the high street. Or, the landlords could lower rent, making smaller independent businesses viable on their sites: the high streets are blooming with this new wave of unregimented enterprises—this is a little oversimplified and black and white, but you get the idea—with a lack of demand for shop sites. Because of the rise of “click and order”, businesses that would have had a hard start in life have a more nurturing environment to grow.
In a way this utopian vision leads me onto another point: The decline of the “commuter” and the rise of the “worker at home”, which divides into subsets of the “coffee addict” and the “now has lots of extra time on their hands so goes wandering round random shops”. After having to work at home for more than 9 months, it appears many people will not go back to their offices (or at least not for the full five-day working week) and abandon their commuter ways; hence, there will be a fall in demand for those shops in city centres reliant on these “lunch breakers”. Nonetheless, these workers, albeit at home, will still yearn for their daily coffee and a croissant in the morning: In comes the hipster café. This new change in behaviour opens up a whole other niche of cafés and other places accessible to workers from home. I can see a rise in child play and dog friendy areas on the horizon too.
Returning to my other subcategory of the “worker at home”, imagine a bloom in diverse local businesses. People love to shop. The more elusive complexity is people love to shop in shops. There is just that little bit more of an immediate dopamine rush that you get when being given your item over the counter and it belongs to you. Brick and mortar is here to stay, except not as clothes shops (as Arcadia has illustrated), but services like nail parlours or maybe (a little wishful thinking from me here) the return of the greengrocer, bakery, butcher and fishmonger. Who doesn’t love the feeling of marching down the high street with little individual compostable bags of organic mushrooms, a punnet of strawberries and freshly baked bread?
At the end of the day, it is all our hands as to what shops thrive on the high street in a post-lockdown Britain, because money talks. Our high streets are currently struggling and need cultivation and love to get back into the swing of things. Yet one thing is certain, they will not be the same as before. I hope to see a time reversal in which we swap commercial chains for more bona fide independent businesses. It is rather interesting to see where the future may lead… (And I’m shopping at Traid not Asos.)
