Posted by theanonymousone 4 days ago
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)
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.
The UK can't make stuff because the rent is too high. Fix this and a lot of stuff downstream of it will change.
the uncomfortable truth is it would make property less interesting for foreign money flowing in the UK.
Rather than taking an introverted look at political power, money and devolving English power from Westminster, in a similar manner as the NI, Scott and Welsh nations to fund investments outside of London.
Perhaps looking at national infrastructure, and agreeing what we want to see in towns and cities then using tax incentives to encourage desired behaviour.
Or we could just blame Europeans for British political decisions. That's been working well.
Which seems to be working pretty well in China.
When Britain was building new towns post WWII it involved a lot of central planning, and seemed to go pretty well.
You state this like it's inherently something to be avoided but you give no reason for believing so
See the Astley (Wigan) Warehouses and SIP car parks for two prime examples.
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.
Outside those very limited exceptions, planning in the UK is done on a discretionary basis, and both the discretionary system and the LDOs are overseen by Local Planning Authorities made up of elected local councillors.
There's no central planning authority, and the system is designed to be flexible at the cost of providing less certainty to developers. Mixed use developments are the norm here, and most new residential blocks will have some form of commercial or social space on the ground floor.
If they want to change planning they can elect a government to change the rules to a “don’t build anything” system. Fortunatly the population as a whole doesn’t do that.
Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default.
I feel like the absurdity is the other way.
Consider the two components of a public daycare: Who runs it and who pays for it.
With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.
With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids. Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?
The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves. Whereas if the parent can do higher skilled work then they can still take the job and use the subsidy money to pay for daycare, even if they're not required to use it for that. So the better subsidy is the one in cash.
Here in Norway it's heavily subsidized. I don't know what the cost for the parents if it would've been if it weren't. But in this very high-cost country it costs about €200/month to have a child in daycare/kindergarten (ages 1-5, usually run separated in age groups 1-2 and 3-5). Second child simultaneously is cheaper. Third is cheaper still.
> Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?
I'm pretty sure that would leave us with extremely variable coverage for those who do choose kindergarten.
> With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.
I'm a free-marketeer. Yet I'm very much of the opinion that kindergartens are not suited for a "competitive market" (nor are e.g. hospitals). Although I am a free-marketeer, I also believe that these are services that should be available at quality to anyone independently of income. I'm very happy that my children are in kindergarten with children from families making half, and twice, of what my family makes.
> The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves.
How is this perverse? Do we not need people doing low-wage jobs? From your wording I feel almost sure you're American.
Because they're subsidizing the rest of the cost. But that's the issue. If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money? Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare. Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.
> I'm pretty sure that would leave us with extremely variable coverage for those who do choose kindergarten.
It would have a similar effect to having an economy that allowed more families to be sustainable on a single income rather than two. Then fewer of them would need daycare and there might be fewer daycares, but that doesn't seem like a great reason to force more kids into daycare, especially when the consequence would plausibly be something like the nearest one to you is 14 km away instead of 10 km.
> Although I am a free-marketeer, I also believe that these are services that should be available at quality to anyone independently of income.
But now you're talking about the price again.
Suppose the actual unsubsidized cost for providing quality service is X. If you provide a daycare subsidy for each child in the amount of X, it costs the government X, and then everyone can afford daycare. If you instead provide a cash subsidy for each child the amount of X, it costs the government X, and still everyone can afford daycare, because paying for it costs X and they received X in cash to use for that or anything else at their choosing.
> How is this perverse? Do we not need people doing low-wage jobs?
It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.
And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.
Because having each parent have to go to a privatized daycare utimately costs more, for a worse service than it being a public service. It also reinforces social segregation, where wealthy parents can afford to put their children into the fancy daycare, while poorer ones either don't (which is horrible for the children), or have them in run down, overcrowded day cares.
Why would it work in such a way for this when it works the opposite for everything else?
> It also reinforces social segregation, where wealthy parents can afford to put their children into the fancy daycare, while poorer ones either don't (which is horrible for the children), or have them in run down, overcrowded day cares.
If the subsidy is enough to pay for the "fancy" daycare then everyone can afford it because everyone gets the subsidy. If it isn't, you haven't done that to begin with, because then the public daycare is underfunded and the wealthy parents use their money to opt out of it regardless of whether it's operated by the government.
They did, for many years. It was a flagship policy of the Christian Democratic party. Labour and the left didn't like it because it was seen as keeping women dependent and out of the labour force (I think something like 90% of the time, it was the woman who took advantage of the subsidy). The far right didn't like it, because it was very often the wrong kind of woman who chose to stay at home with their 2 year old. So it was steadily reduced until I think it was removed entirely.
It should also be said that a lot of parents who took the stay at home subsidy didn't actually stay at home, but hired a nanny instead of sending their children to kindergarten. That got disapproval even from the traditionalists.
I know. I used the price as an example to indicate how heavily subsidized it must be.
> If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?
Because the market for daycare will favor the well-off. You're just topping off the income of people who need daycare, then leaving everyone to fend for themselves. That's often OK. I think there are some sectors where it's not. Kindergartens being one. This is, for both of us, of course just opinions.
> Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare.
And if you hand off more cash, you get better daycare. And less cash, worse daycare. I'm totally fine with that logic for TVs and cars, not so much with our children. Even from a purely capitalist perspective: a major force in capitalism is rewarding and thereby incentivizing useful behavior – what behavior of the children are we incentivizing (resp. disincentivizing) by sending them to a good (resp. bad) kindergarten? It's absurd.
> Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.
And now you've taken a person out of the labor force. Possibly forever. Granted, there are some big open questions about the labor force going forward, but looking back decades it's been clear that that's a bad thing in western societies.
> It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.
None of this makes much sense in most cases. In my municipality, kindergarten employees are responsible for roughly 5 small children or 8 big children at any given time. There are no full-time jobs in this country that pay a fifth of a kindergarten employee's salary (yes yes, there are overheads etc).
But yes, I can see the math maybe working out if you have 4 children under the age of six and are working as e.g. a cleaner. Maybe. I think that's a very small segment of society. And you know, I'd much rather still send those kids to kindergarten, have them play with the children of millionaires and children like themselves all day, while the parent retrains for a job they'd rather do.
The person having so many children on such a low income is probably also living in very confined space. I'm sure those kids love the change of scenery!
> And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.
I agree that useful jobs should be well-paying enough that recruiting people into them doesn't require applying extra societal pressure. Of course.
The amount of the subsidy is an independent question. Regardless of the amount you choose, it can then be in kind or in cash.
> Because the market for daycare will favor the well-off. You're just topping off the income of people who need daycare, then leaving everyone to fend for themselves.
If you give someone with less money the amount of money it takes to pay for a quality daycare, they obviously now have the money to pay for it -- you've just given it to them.
At which point there are two possibilities, right? One is, they use it for that, in which case your objection doesn't apply. It's the same thing as happens if daycare was provided in kind.
The other is, they use a less expensive daycare because they need something else more than they need the more expensive daycare, e.g. they would use the extra money to buy food. Then what you're really doing is forcing them to use the more expensive daycare when given the choice they'd have used the money for something they regard as more important. That's not actually helping them when they're right, but assuming they're wrong is assuming that you know their circumstances better than they do.
> And now you've taken a person out of the labor force. Possibly forever.
Only under the assumption that being a homemaker isn't work.
> None of this makes much sense in most cases. In my municipality, kindergarten employees are responsible for roughly 5 small children or 8 big children at any given time. There are no full-time jobs in this country that pay a fifth of a kindergarten employee's salary (yes yes, there are overheads etc).
Daycare as a business/government has costs that daycare as a family member doesn't. The former needs a separate piece of real estate to operate out of, insurance against claims by the family, the full complement of support staff for accounting/legal/HR/etc. The latter uses their own home which is a sunk cost and doesn't require the rest of it because they're not an organization.
On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.
The requirements are nothing but a type of tax whose revenue is allocated to some de facto government program. But taxes on new development are asinine because they inherently get passed on as higher rents for humans and businesses, and the latter then have to pass them on as higher prices -- or can't afford them and go out of business, which is how you get the high street full of vape shops.
That does not seem true. Most (though certainly not all) daycares I see in Europe have buildings that have a layout similar to a school with outdoor areas. A daycare doesn’t need a window front but needs a sandpit.
Then zoning happened and the process stopped, particularly for retail and dining. Zoning means it's expensive to convert residential spaces to commercial, and vice-versa, if you're allowed at all. So to make it work you gotta build new and bigger. But that's expensive, and the way commercial financing works means new commercial construction only pencils out for chains. The numbers work even if the space would stay empty, because even a bunch of small shops couldn't afford the rent that needs to be advertised for the space to make the financing pencil out.
Basically, zoning causes problems that are then addressed with more regulations, which causes more problems.
And also, people need to adjust their expectations. Small commercial and services spaces will rarely be able to bring in enough revenue to pay rent in a brand new multistory steel building, no matter the floor area. These businesses can only thrive in old buildings, at least in advanced, high-labor cost economies. But you can't build new old buildings. All you can do is make it cheap and easy for the market to repurpose existing spaces to meet demand, and do this everywhere, not just in a corridor you're planning for (otherwise you're not actually allowing low-end spaces to emerge; a Starbucks will snap it up; there's needs to be enough of these spaces to allow the entire market to shift down). But zoning and approval processes create an economic environment antithetical to this.
If you want to keep your zoning and planning but are frustrated the free market doesn't do what you demand it to do, the state needs to build the darn spaces themselves and rent them out. But they don't like to do that because, shocker, it's really expensive to do things the way they demand. When the state (and community via taxes) has to internalize the costs of these demands directly rather than point fingers, it turns out they have trouble justifying the expense.
I live in a tourist town in Norway. There are some nice shops. A nice cafe run by some Italians, a coffee place which started out as a church initiative (then got kicked out from their original locale when it turned out they were much, much better at selling good coffee than evangelizing) which has awesome concerts and an art gallery, to name two of my favorites.
There are also tourist tat shops. Dozens of them. One prominent one at the entrance to the main shop with a blinged-out AI generated moose. Oh, and casinos - I mean bingo places. They just extract money. The owners don't live here, so they don't care. They're parasitic, they might well go broke without the few positive externality shops around them - but they make more money than those decent shops. And landlords set the rent accordingly.
Of course there's one place where they do central planning, where they realize that externalities are crucial in retail and charge rent accordingly, and where there's not a single tourist tat shop. That place is the mall.
I don't see that in Japan, which is very liberal in zoning. Taiwan is less liberal but doesn't pick which shops. Both are wonderful countries with vibrant, dynamic cities. We have friends in both places, and family in the latter, and life is quite pleasant.
So a child living in the middle of nowhere gets to never see their parent because that parent spend 4 hours a day commuting, because building flats in the city isn't allowed. Where is that kid going to daycare now?
(Actually you can do that to, if you just buy it up and let it fall into disrepair, argue it has no value now and tear down everything but the facades. That's how we got the aforementioned mall)
Any developer can buy up a patch of land, throw up some houses in a month so close together that if you run out of toilet paper you can just reach out your window and use some of your neighbours, and with a design life just the same as the mortgage.
Oh the access road totally buggers up traffic along the existing road? Oh well too bad, full speed ahead and damn the externalities!
This leads to the situation that's arisen in a housing development (described as a village, where it's really about 300 houses crammed into a small field), where the houses have in fact not made it to their design life of 25 years and have had to be demolished at about 15 years old.
So, you've got people paying a £400,000 mortgage on a patch of rubble and mud, who are currently taking up space in council housing with the taxpayer footing the bill. But hey! At least it provided a lot of shareholder value! Full speed ahead and damn the externalities!
This needs to be weighed against the externalities of homelessness. And if traffic is a problem, remove the cars and add bike infra (bloom Merwede is an example of this, albeit in a very expensive city).
Where are houses from 2011 being torn down? Short of mica that seems ridiculous.
Bike infrastructure works great in urban parts of Holland. It doesn't work well in rural Scotland. I'll tell you what - I'll scrap my 30-year-old Range Rover agricultural machinery if you can demonstrate how a bakfiets can replace it.
These particular houses are in the outer part of Greater Glasgow. They're about 15 years old, the framing is absolutely rotten, and the crappy brickwork is literally falling apart. There's no saving them. They were build quickly and cheaply and sold at a premium price, like everything else.
Worth noting that cycling works great in rural Netherlands too...
For what it's worth, I made a video about cycling infrastructure and urbanism in rural Ireland (where I used to live). Not the same as Scotland but maybe there are parallels - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew . In some ways rural areas are better suited to bike infra than suburban because you have more space and there's generally less traffic. And many rural areas are still a reasonable distance from a town - in fact, I found that when I was driving, I'd just go to Tullamore or Athlone, but on my bike, I'd ride to Clara, a much closer and smaller town. If more people did this it might help revitalize smaller towns.
I'm not seeing anything about a wave of house demolitions in Glasgow except for a lot of old postwar towers and, oddly, this - https://www.urbanrealm.com/news/2023/06/11/glasgow-house-dem... - where the house seems quite nice.
You mean inconveniently mislaid bulging brown envelopes?
Yes, of course they fucking do, it's the only way they get away with it.
So? Nothing wrong with that.
Do some bunch of government clerks decide EVERY single _factory_ input and output in whole country is nothing wrong ? Starting with impossibility to do it right - is doing it by necessity wrong is not wrong ?
Do "central" setting prices for whole country, let say for next quarter - no matter reality - is possible ? I lived it and tell you: it's always wrong because it's impossible to do.
How you plan problems in production ? How you out-plan so someone stepped on something fragile ?
How you out-plan someone steal something ? Because "central planning" is sign that it's not good in your country so there is stealing and corruption on every step starting from "planners" to plans distributor to workers to packers to sellers.
How you like that reality now ?
Communism fall for a reason: stupidity of the imagined aka planned system. Because in all despotic systems on top of all of what needs to be done to live and work planned good life you have grafted parasitic structure of peoples which single occupation is just to spy on and terrorize their own peoples - and that costs a lot both in money and society quality.
Lack of freedom do this.
But some degree of central planning for at least some of society's operations has always been essential to make a civilized society work. Laws, regulations, taxes and subsidies, and natural monopolies such as armed forces, police forces, fire services and wide area road networks, are all centrally planned in modern societies.
Just as communist-style total regulation of everything has always failed, total deregulation has also been shown to fail everywhere it has been tried, as someone will always step into the resulting power vacuum and take control. If you disagree with me on this, please give me an example of a stable anarchist society that does not ride of top of someone else's regulated society.
The only question is where you put the boundaries.
For example: we prevent companies from producing bread with arsenic in it, even if producing it would be more economically efficient for that company. Is this something you would advocate?
Dude straight said, citing from memory: So ? Nothing wrong with it.
And I asked about his definition of central planing.
And I then described central planing from East block - Soviet and rest of occupied countries.
So if someone not see badness in what is most known failure of central planing then this is quite wtf.
And what is your definition of central planning because looks like you do not see difference between "law and regulations" and central planning that already happened on Earth.
But if someone makes boundaries foggy or meaningless then there is lack of sense in discussion.
But actually you must be trolling - how on the Earth universal restrictions in poisoning land in discussion about central planned economy ??
The only way to make a functional society that doesn't leave people behind, yes ?
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.
There are people go out of their way to buy...American candy in the UK?
Utterly perverted.
2022 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61777445
2025 https://www.cityam.com/how-money-laundering-took-over-our-hi...
But the "American Candy Shop" places were/are doing money laundering and/or tax fraud. They can say they sold individual candies for £0.50 (cost: 5p each), the profit goes to a shell company in the Virgin Islands etc, and before the business taxes are due the company "goes bust" and disappears. Then a new one takes its place.
4 years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/04/us-swe...
This year: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/18/dodgy-shops-ha...
The fudge recipe on the back is actually really good FYI
Also the containers are a nice pliable rubbery plastic so they're good to repurpose for garage use.
All these stores dont exist in my country, you can buy watered down mountain dew, pop tarts for 10€ per box and the local fast food chains are mcdonalds, burger king and subway with an occasional kfc and a metropol city may have a pizza hut.
Sure its all marketing, but if im paying 10€ for a delivery pizza i at least want the box to look like a domino piece.
Most of US sweets ive tried were okayish, my favorite being reeses small cups. Was disappointed by how bad cheeze-its are, they were given away in stores as the sales were so poor and started with a money back promotion and still didnt get sold. Takis seem to have found their way, also taco bell (i know its tex-mex, but still a variety from burgers) opened stores in germany and the netherlands hoping it reaches a broader audience and can get more people attracted as i actually like the food given the price point and being somewhat more healthy than a quarter pounder with cheese.
Softdrinks on the other hand really do taste better. European Gatorade is cat piss compared to US Gatorade. Mountain Dew like i said is only the base version and even this tastes watered down. Hoping for a baja blast rollout in EU with taco bell making a push here. Dr Pepper is really awful in europe compared to american dr pepper but at the end its all about personal preference. Ive seen a lot of americans loving Moser Roth Chocolate from the european Aldi which is their expensive version of good chocolate but still at a discounter price. People that love this would probably die for godiva or leonidas chocolate.
I mean, I know they exist too, but that's orthogonal to wanting to eat any of it...
>Was disappointed by how bad cheeze-its are,
My experience is that Cheez-Its are more often than other chips or crackers, likely to go stale on the shelf-might have something to do with the recipe.
>also taco bell (i know its tex-mex, but still a variety from burgers) opened stores in germany and the netherlands hoping it reaches a broader audience and can get more people attracted as i actually like the food given the price point and being somewhat more healthy than a quarter pounder with cheese.
For many years in RI, Taco Bell was the only mexican place we had. Finding authentic Tex-Mex was worth a trip (as far as North Carolina) when I was in 7th grade. As for it being healthier than a QP...ymmv depending on the menu....
As for drinks...how do you screw up Gatorade & Dr Pepper? The syrup/powder just needs to be reconstituted...is it something in the water?
Also, yes, Moser Roth chocolate at Aldi is a steal, quality-wise.
The US has something similar going on with medical and dental offices for the same reasons.
Who's to say how many clients a nail bar had? A box of fake nails is easily dumped in the bin.
The only way I can think to police it, would be for tax inspectors to stand outside and count the customers!
It's just stupid that councils have no problem arguing that say, Clarkson(sorry, stupid example) can't open a pub in a town with no other pub or other employment opportunities, but 17th vape shop on the same street is fair game and free market.
Yes. I'm surprised that business licenses aren't already a thing.
I expect a competent government to issue licenses to barbers based off them proving hygiene standards, trained staff with college diplomas in hair-dressing, number of employees, and an extremely limited number of these to be issued based off local need calculated from population by census.
I expect local government to issue similar licenses for all other industries, who should prove their competency, adherence to standards, jobs created, and cater to local needs.
It's not about licences - councils can absolutely decide if a business can or can not operate in any area already, regardless of licence requirements.
We all want little cutsey shops and such but how much money for that is actually sitting on the sidelines at any given time ready to pounce? Hardly any at all, if any. Nail shops and other bullshit on the other hand? There’s private equity specialized in selling shares of these schemes.
You can buy a vape online, but as a smoker, you don't want to wait a day when you've run out. Also as a smoker, I don't get why they're not regulated like tobacco. They shouldn't be sold alongside sweets, and should otherwise be treated like cigs (e.g. on packaging, licensing, advertising etc.). Seems very low-hanging legislative fruit.
I think you don't know why cigarettes are treated the way they are.
Hint: it's not because they are addictive. After all, caffeine is addictive and both tea and coffee is effectively unregulated.
I was just looking at the prices for city centre commercial rental in my nearest town. Huge spaces available, it's generally more per month, and I'd be worried about the rates threshold, but at a lower price point we'd be in business.
I think there's something to that. More people using a centre for work would create more opportunities in towns.
Again, I think the challenge the UK has is the gross differential between incomes and the cost of buying or renting property. Unsustainable, and very much part of these morbid symptoms.
The issue with that approach is that it results in numerous vacant spaces, which fail to attract enough foot traffic to be appealing to other businesses.
There was a struggling shopping mall near my home. Many retailers left the premises after one of the big stores shut down. Recently some other big brand occupied the space, in a couple of months besides it there is a Samsung store and an apple store. Now all spaces are busy and they stay busy all week long.
This makes me suspect that we highly optimised for the "2010s" online era without considering the side effects.
The UK economy has faltered and not had a chance to recover since 2008. The more recent improvements really because of a reproachment of Brexit and global concerns around the US are welcome but not necessarily structural improvements in the UK.
It's no coincidence that the businesses that can easily evade tax and usually also sell illegal goods are the ones that dominate the high street.
A small business might be less accurate - figure out a "reasonable rate", and therefore charge less.
In many cases you can’t find out who the owner is. There’s too many shell companies involved.
These firms don’t care about occupancy, they care about the resale book value.
Business tax rates are based on those property valuations.
There’s no chance the property companies will reduce the value of their portfolio to reduce burden for tenants they don’t care about.
Then you have foreign online retailers like Amazon and Temu able to use complex multinational tax avoidance schemes and fake products to undercut the high street.
How can you compete if Amazon can deliver a knock off from China, that you can’t legally sell, faster than you can stock a real one into the shop, and at half the price?
isn’t that a great lever then?
Convince your neighbors that it's better to buy products they know from producers they trust from neighbors they live near.
It's small town and old school, but I don't see any other solution.
So unless your "convicing" is a serious eufimism for fairy drastic emforcement, the plan is doomed.
Social exclusion, like putting a kid in timeout.
Maybe they will get the hint, maybe not.
The preconditions to the type of homogenious high trust environment that is required for this to scale is very fictional at the moment. But I would commend you for trying.
If good shops are available people will use them, if they provide what they're looking for.
I think we need the government to look at how retail works and what shoppers actually want.
There's not much local shops can do about the long tail, they can't stock everything. At the very least need to stop penalising them financially and allowing online retailers to compete on tax avoidance.
My father is old and naive. He was tricked into ordering fake "Yorkshire" tea bags from Temu. Fake tea bags for gods sake. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.
We have no control on the quality coming from these sites. We can't even guarantee items are not made using slavery. Both Temu and Chien executives refused to reveal that in parliamentary investigations.
Stuff like that has to stop, standards needs to be universally applied or the bad will drive out the good.
The problem with the British high street is that, in the long run, nobody is going to keep visiting the umpteenth independent café serving acidic coffee at £5 a cup, or the minimarket selling the same cheap tat I could buy on Temu for a third of the price.
You compete with Amazon on quality or selling an experience.
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
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.
And it’s true. Northampton is doing pretty great compared to a majority of the U.K.
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.
there's a chance that London money flows down there though, like Nice and the Riviera for France, I don't know
Expensive != posh -- the proximity and relatively easy trains to London probably help make it expensive.
Unfortunately the British elites know how to colonise and extract, they’re just terrible at administering and building anything sustainable
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.
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
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
- 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)
…we were the only customer there. There is no way in hell there isn’t something dodgy afoot. Would be surprised if they have 50 bucks of legitimate revenue a day
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).
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.
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.
I think the commenter has expanded further on what he or she thinks they ARE doing, I reserve judgement - but this phenomenon is apparent.
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.
Yes, but be careful about implying that the dominant causation is poverty -> crime. Crime is the best cause of poverty because it makes doing business impossible and forces every actor to make every aspect of their life more and more inefficient in order to protect what they already have. Places like, say, Singapore are case studies in how a crackdown on law and order is all it takes to make a place go from very poor to extremely wealthy in a generation or so.
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.
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)
It's not merely a bit controversial, it's heresy
UPD: looked at your other comments... wow..
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.
To a limited extent as an individual. One can't simply remake the entire world they were born within.
Btw, the premise underlying this fact is a fallacy. It is the norm for population groups, even meaningfully differing ones, to have "more internal variation" than between groups.
There is more variation in height within sexes than between them, but despite this there is still a very (statistically and culturally) significant difference in average height between men and women.
It's even possible for two distributions to be completely separated by a given variable while still having more internal variance.
Tall women are taller than short men, so if you're hiring a librarian who needs to be able to reach books on a high shelf, you still need to look at the individual. Society as a whole suffers if you run employment ads saying "Women need not apply," so we rightfully deter that.
What are some of the other "facts" "we" know about? Are you conveniently ignoring the Epstein class and all we've learned?
That's what's going on here. @passive is repeating the word "fact" from the parent comment.
It's been allowed to fester because the late 20th century was (so far) the high water mark for societal tolerance of that sort of thing and it hasn't been abused enough since to really see much legal scrutiny.
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.
Waspy paternalism gave us eugenics, multi-generational welfare and plenty of other great stuff so it's not like the alternative is all that much better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or you pay minimum rent but your landlord gives you some of it back?
Idk, there's probably room for creativity here
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.
I mean isn’t the whole rub the cost of housing is outpacing wages? Goes to show how short our historical perspective really is.
It is not:) There had been a fortunate coincidence of factors such as economy, job market, demography, immigration from EU countries which all enabled it. That's all over now, it's gone.
What happens when all rent is extracted? We're about to find out.
Italian cities are depopulating because of economic decline, not because people feel increasingly unsafe after 5.
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.
Are there parts of society where this is different? This whole going concern is vibe-based.
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.
Add coffee shops and restaurants nearby, help promote casual entertainment venues like mini golf, community theatre, and weekend markets.
Grow from there based on the type of demand that appears, keep business rates low for the area.
They say it can't be done, but when that last shop closes right now there will be no choice.
To combat the dereliction and anti social behaviour they would have to rebuild anyway, and it will cost them more later than gradual repurpose/ investment.
Look at European cities that have implemented this even in part, and tell me it isn't much nicer with fewer cars. Shopkeepers are usually opposed to it before, but see that the improvement in atmosphere attracts more customers than are lost through the lack of parking spaces.
Which European cities would those be? And I'm not interested by the tourist-infested ones.
La Panne / De Panne, Oostende, Knokke-Heist, etc, all have quite vibrant town centres, seasonal events, food markets, playgrounds, free-to-the-public pétanque/boules courts, you name it.
Then in France, Strasbourg has completely pedestrianised the town centre, which is similarly successful, although a little more touristy as you say - nice places attract tourists and shopping, it's unavoidable!
Much of the city area, not many at all. Superblocks in Spanish cities come to mind.
Good public transport, common from 100k people or so. Universal in megacities.
And one of the reasons is definitely that out of your list, city planners have very different ideas about the first point, free parking. They want the opposite: ideally, no cars in the city at all. So, parking fees have been raising to exorbitant ranges as they want to incentivize people to take public transport instead. Except that people instead turn to internet shopping.
Largely because no-one wants to go shopping then carry potentially heavy items on a bus or bike.
I grew up near Bluewater shopping center in England, which had plentiful free parking, lots of good shops that were open late and a security team which moved people doing undesirable things along.
Compare this to the nearest towns (Chatham, Gillingham, Strood, Rochester), where the (often Conservative!) council members seemed perplexed that people didn't want to pay £6/hour to park in a decrepit garage that constantly smelled of piss and walk past myriad instances of low-level quality of life crime to get to shops that closed before most office workers could reasonably leave work.
I haven't been back in ~10 years but I imagine the situation now is even worse and all of those towns are in the same category of vape shops, charity shops and empty shops.
German high-street retail establishments are open a ton more hours every week despite not being allowed to open on most Sundays.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn3p7by5F0I
A lot of what he said about the root causes of why UK high streets were dying seems to have been accurate, and this is before the double whammy of the Covid pandemic and the increase in interest rates to tackle inflation (as well as the mini-budget crisis of 2022), plus energy prices for shops and pubs in the UK are really high.
Retail parks are so popular in the UK because being able to visit a couple of stores in the park and do your shopping in one hit, plus the cheap/free parking, and that is ultimately what UK shoppers want - convenience.
If councils want to rescue their high streets, they may have to get more creative when it comes to getting new stores to open, beyond just offering a respite on business rates.
Highstreets have become hostile to the shopper, no doubt.
Basically supermarkets stole the highstreet's lunch, then moved out of town.
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.
In small towns maybe less because most people going shopping aren't from the town itsef but its surroundings so if they need to bring a car in the first place, they'd rather go where they can park it. And this is somehow a failure on how most european cities have tackled mobility itself. A lot of urban areas have been equipped with more or less secure bike paths, but they too often become impractical or plain dangerous outside in the larger area outside of the cities.
If you can’t put a picnic table on it, it’s a place where movement must be prioritized over recreation.
But we did remove traffic from half of Oxford Street last week.