Posted by theanonymousone 4 days ago
No, it's that I don't like the council and central government turning a blind eye to obvious crime fronts because they're desperate for the tax. Don't call me a bigot or xenophobe.
I would prefer them to be knocked down for housing frankly, as many town centres are close to useful train stations. The council can then use the council tax
Councils are supporting the don't build any housing any where mandate. It is such an obvious use of the land it's crazy. We still have to delusionally play along with ideas about how to "regenerate the high street".
Case in point. Huddersfield is currently "regenerating" its town borrowing huge sums for a new library and new markets etc instead of just flattening the town and replacing it with housing. The railway line is also having a major upgrade. The timing is literally perfect. Another own goal. But hey a lot of employment was generated and I'm sure the mandate to employ local didn't mean a lot of backhanders....
People will move to a shithole if it has good transport links to jobs, which Huddersfield has. Look at Romford for example. The council has sold off loads of land for flats and is selling more. All because of the new Elizabeth Line
Guess what the result is when 10,000s people with good jobs move in to an area? Demand for shops and services!
Not sure about how to get out of this pickle. So many modern problems stem from the crash of our prehistory behavioral adaptions against new context brought on by civilization and technology, which now moves faster than we could actually adapt through natural selection.
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.
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.
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.)
Industrial businesses were less rigid about avoiding retail sales than today but it was still way more hassle and generally "the dark ages" comparatively.
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.
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.
There are still goods that are primarily bought in person, hazardous and large where shipping is prohibitive.
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.
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*: 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
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.
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.
And the ones left aren’t paying taxes, or wages.
So a lot of high-earners would now have to pay UK taxes on worldwide income. So they left the country or only stay there mininal amount of days to not be considered resident.
Many high street businesses were working for these people with tons of disposable income.
Also criminal situation was little better when these high-profile people were roaming London streets. No one wanted something happen to them.
Poundland[1] is going under as high net worth customers switch their purchases of multipack Wagonwheels to Dubai. ;)
This is just nonsense. If out of town retail parks are still flourishing then it's not a lack of consumer demand; it's price and convenience that matters.
1. Poundland is actually going under because a US private equity fund, Gordon Brothers, spied an opportunity to asset strip them by pretending to offer investment.
They were gifted the business for a nominal £1 and have refused all offers of a buyout that would keep Poundland afloat.