Part 3 The Modern Industrial Revolution

Is the high street doomed or will it contract a little or will it adapt?

We’ve spoken to hundreds of retail and service suppliers and we are observing some trends. Many small to medium retailers are change averse and want to struggle on just as they are.

The changing customer habit in high street retail.

In this respect, for some there is a self fulfilling prophesy:

…I get no customers from the web – so I don’t bother to cater for web customers…
…I don’t cater for web customers – so I get no customers from the web…
…and so on

There’s a lot of ‘I don’t…’ and ‘I have never tried…’ and ‘I’m happy with the way things are….’ in the language used. There’s an unfamiliarity and state of mind issue for some.

Perhaps in order for the high street retail to survive going forwards the mindset needs to change and there may be a different breed of retailer to embrace their customers new behaviours on the web and work with it.

Like any business – there are many things you need to do

• you have to do the accounts
• you have to do the tax returns
• if you employ people you have to know about employment law and pensions
• you have to…
• you have to…
• you have to embrace the web…..or do you?

And that last point IS THE POINT. All the rest you HAVE to do. Embracing the web, well, many are in denial, ignorance is bliss, but it’s tragic to behold.

So many are not yet adapting to the new industrial revolution happening around them. But the customers have embraced this revolution ALREADY and in some cases completely.

It really is now the survival of the fittest and I am sure the best will win out in the end.

As Einstein is reputed to have said ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different to happen.’

Make the web work positively for you and embrace the new revolution. With the squeeze on cost of living, this means that it is even more important to do so.

Next up what else can you do with Google Tours?

www.sciarts.co.uk

© Arenaphotouk | Dreamstime.com - Victorian Shops, Dudley. Photo

Part 2 The Modern Industrial Revolution

Why are some businesses impacted more than others?

The revolution means that customers shop in different ways. They check out a web site, a Google+ page, a Google Tour and might even compare prices whilst looking in your shop window.

This means that retail and services need to ‘integrate fully their physical stores, on line sites and other channels such as social media coherently’, in other words improve their on-line activity including social media. See the UK Centre for Retail Research (http://www.retailresearch.org/retail2018.php)

We have come across towns in traditional tourist hot spots which are struggling to survive, whilst others are doing very well thank you. The best high street retailers attract tourists and shoppers and these days these retailers do that by going on-line and working the web.

Retailers have an on-line presence whether they like it or not, whether they want it or not. No web site, and no customer interaction through social media or email, means a poor web presence in comparison to others. It doesn’t do justice to their shop or their town (although no amount of web tech will give you a sale if you are trying to sell goods no one wants to buy of course).

And speaking of tradesmen, a colleague of mine said that he was looking for a plumber, but ‘some of them don’t EVEN have a website’. Note the language ‘don’t EVEN have a web site’. He ‘just wanted to know more about them’ before contacting them. In this day and age you are expected to ‘communicate’ and reach out to potential customers and that EVEN includes tradesmen.

People make decisions about whether to visit a town by what is presented on the web. Less and less do they visit through loyalty to a specific business. If they don’t see what they want, they won’t come. There can never be too much information out there.

The question is – is the high street doomed or will it contract a little or will it adapt? See Part 3

Part 1 The Modern Industrial Revolution

Survival of the fittest.

We are in the middle of a modern industrial revolution. You might not realise it, but we are.

New ways of shopping

It is no less disruptive than the age of steam, weaving looms and mechanisation. The difference is you just can’t see it happening around you and nobody seems to care about the hundreds of thousands of job losses. It’s almost imperceptible.

Yes, I’m talking about High Street Retail and Services. But what’s the threat you might ask? Well, it’s the web itself if retail does not adapt to it. If retail embraces it, then the web will be its saviour.

I’ve just re-read an article by the UK Centre for Retail Research (http://www.retailresearch.org/retail2018.php) predicting what will happen between 2013 and 2018 to high street retail. We’re now half way through that time frame.

In the article, they said that store numbers would fall from around 280,000 to 220,000 by 2018 in the UK, along with job losses of 100’s of thousands of people.

And it said that on-line retail would increase from 12.7% to 21.5%. It also stated that ‘UK retailing has the highest proportion of on-line retail sales’ in the world, and that ‘Retailers with a strong web offering need just 70 high street stores to create a national presence compared to 250 in the mid 2000’s’.

This means that a proportion of town centres will lose more than 27,000 stores (that’s more than 5,000 a year). These will be predominantly in disadvantaged areas – they stated Wales, the North and the Midlands.

Looking at the web, it seems that they may be right. In 2012 more than 7,000 stores closed (approximately 20 per day) and in 2014 more than 5,800 stores closed (16 stores a day). It is estimated that there are more than 50,000 retail units vacant in shops and leisure.

In Part 2 we look at why some businesses are more impacted by this than others.