It was inevitable really, but now it really is time to call it…. The highstreet is dead! For years, I have preached the benefits of shopping online to even the most adamant technophobes, so you may find it ironic that I am the first to miss our old friend the highstreet.
This weekend I was looking to buy some rollerblades, and seeing as they need to fit extremely well for comfort’s sake, I decided that rather than buy them online as I would with anything else, I would actually go to a shop to try some on. The problem? there are no shops left. Well none that sell rollerblades anyway. I went to two large towns near me (Basingstoke and Reading, the latter is actually a city), and after searching high and low, there was not one shop that sold rollerblades.
Actually, that’s a bit of a lie, John Lewis sold some budget skates, but seeing as I have been skating for 10 years, I wanted some good ones, and that’s when it dawned on me. As more and more people buy online, the sort of specialist retailers where I would have bought skates during in the 90s have been forced to either close, or move to cheaper industrial space rather than the highstreet prime retail space they used to occupy. It seems there has been a lot of consolidation and where we may have had 100 specialist skate shops across the UK before, now we have perhaps 10, and most of them probably rely on Internet sales for the bulk of their turnover.
Of course this does mean that we as the consumer get better prices, so I have ordered them online now. Lets just hope they fit.