Why is the "death of the town center" a problem?

[IroningMan]

Changedmyname said:

Kermit power said:

Sorry to hear that for you personally, although it does suggest something of a paradox. If enough High Street butchers are doing well enough for web-based affairs not to be able to thrive, surely that suggests "The High Street" as an entity doesn't particularly have a problem, so much as individual High Streets, mostly in stty areas?

The whole problem seems to effect all Butchers not just me, as I know all the butchers in my area , they all say the same thing , trade has dropped and the jobs market for this particular trade are few and far between.
My own shop has taken the hit as less and less holiday makers come to this part of Wales , the caravan sites where only half full at the peak of the season which was never heard off 5 ago.
This has been the trend through out seaside towns in the UK ,people no longer have the spending power that they once did.

I'm able to write this now because my shop is dead...ish even on a saturday.

Edited by Changedmyname on Saturday 5th January 15:45

An acquaintance of mine has just opened his second butcher's shop. In Bradford-on-Avon. It's easy for me to say, but quality meat, as opposed to supermarket garbage, is now a luxury choice - be it by way of ignorance, marketing, or economics - if it's what you want to do, then you need to find somewhere affluent to do it.

On a near total tangent, it was interesting to read that Laverstoke has absorbed a good deal of Mr Scheckter's savings without so far turning a profit.

[JDRoest]

fido said:

But why would you want to? There are buses passing through the High Street every couple of minutes and a Waitrose with free parking for larger shopping trips. In fact it's rather busy these days as the London sprawl has practically engulfed the area (try parking down the road in Raynes Park!). It's actually a good example of a high street with nearby out-of-town shopping. 2 miles away covers Norbiton and Kingston so if you can't find parking then you're not looking hard enough. Cheam Village has a large car park literally around the corner, but I haven't been round there for a few years.

If you knew New Malden High Street before they spent £2m of GLA money on it, it was a much easier place to deal with.

All the bus stops got built out, all the pavements were built out, and what became quite a wide road became pretty narrow, and they added clutter in the middle to ensure that cars could get round anything stopped on the roadway (eg a bus).

The net affect was the removal of a substantial amount of free parking spaces, put in a taxi rank (???), clogged the high street up something awful, and create traffic jams in the surrounding area.

To make matters worse, whilst they spent a 18 months digging up the high street to 'improve' it, they removed a huge amount of access to the retailers, and practically put half of them out of business.

Again, another thing they did was build bus stop build outs on Burlington Road to ensure that buses no longer moved in when collecting passengers, and preventing cars from passing, which again made a massive bottle neck at the Fountain.

[JDRoest]

That whole area is a really good example of where the councils are making life miserable for car owners, which does affect where people shop and how they shop (online or physical store).

For instance, the lights at Green Lane in Worcester Park ensure that traffic is not only backed up the to A3 every single rush hour, but backed up all the way to North Cheam. Buses are no better as they are stuck in the same traffic.

Lights at South Lane on the Malden Road ensures that traffic is often backed up to Motspur Park (Road) on a normal day.

Worcester Park is just a traffic trap with 4 sets of lights from the station to the top of the high street.

[Kermit power]

JDRoest said:

That whole area is a really good example of where the councils are making life miserable for car owners, which does affect where people shop and how they shop (online or physical store).

For instance, the lights at Green Lane in Worcester Park ensure that traffic is not only backed up the to A3 every single rush hour, but backed up all the way to North Cheam. Buses are no better as they are stuck in the same traffic.

Lights at South Lane on the Malden Road ensures that traffic is often backed up to Motspur Park (Road) on a normal day.

Worcester Park is just a traffic trap with 4 sets of lights from the station to the top of the high street.

The whole area would be heaving in rush hour anyway. If you removed traffic lights, more people would just get back in their cars to fill the extra available space.

I'm all for making life easy for the motorist when motoring is the only sensible option, but around the Surrey/Sutton/Kingston borders, it's rarely even the best option, let alone the only one.

[JonRB]

The Oracle roundabout in Reading is another great example of traffic light hell. The lights are sequenced in such a way as when your light is green you can't get onto the roundabout due to the traffic backed up from the red partway round. So you sit there until your light goes red again and nothing moves.

[JDRoest]

Kermit power said:

The whole area would be heaving in rush hour anyway. If you removed traffic lights, more people would just get back in their cars to fill the extra available space.

I'm all for making life easy for the motorist when motoring is the only sensible option, but around the Surrey/Sutton/Kingston borders, it's rarely even the best option, let alone the only one.

Trouble is Kermit - the area wasn't heaving quite as badly as when they started screwing around with the road system. Every change they made, made things much worse.

[GBB]

thinfourth2 said:

mrmr96 said:

Because small local shops tend to be run by small local shop keepers who in turn spend money locally and employ local people. They also pay local tax (business rates) and also corporation tax in the UK.

Fine in principle but when did you last see a small locally owned shop in a town centre

Most town centres are identical to out of town retail parks just with worse parking

Blame business rates - not affordable unless you are a large national and a killer for any start up. The "relief" offered is merely deferring payment not reducing it.

[Johnnytheboy]

JDRoest said:

Kermit power said:

The whole area would be heaving in rush hour anyway. If you removed traffic lights, more people would just get back in their cars to fill the extra available space.

I'm all for making life easy for the motorist when motoring is the only sensible option, but around the Surrey/Sutton/Kingston borders, it's rarely even the best option, let alone the only one.

Trouble is Kermit - the area wasn't heaving quite as badly as when they started screwing around with the road system. Every change they made, made things much worse.

IIRC for about a decade prior to the congestion charge being introduced, central London got more congested, despite traffic volumes slightly declining.

One can only assume other factors, e.g. bus lanes etc. were to blame.

[jmorgan]

IroningMan said:

Changedmyname said:

Kermit power said:

Sorry to hear that for you personally, although it does suggest something of a paradox. If enough High Street butchers are doing well enough for web-based affairs not to be able to thrive, surely that suggests "The High Street" as an entity doesn't particularly have a problem, so much as individual High Streets, mostly in stty areas?

The whole problem seems to effect all Butchers not just me, as I know all the butchers in my area , they all say the same thing , trade has dropped and the jobs market for this particular trade are few and far between.
My own shop has taken the hit as less and less holiday makers come to this part of Wales , the caravan sites where only half full at the peak of the season which was never heard off 5 ago.
This has been the trend through out seaside towns in the UK ,people no longer have the spending power that they once did.

I'm able to write this now because my shop is dead...ish even on a saturday.

Edited by Changedmyname on Saturday 5th January 15:45

An acquaintance of mine has just opened his second butcher's shop. In Bradford-on-Avon. It's easy for me to say, but quality meat, as opposed to supermarket garbage, is now a luxury choice - be it by way of ignorance, marketing, or economics - if it's what you want to do, then you need to find somewhere affluent to do it.

On a near total tangent, it was interesting to read that Laverstoke has absorbed a good deal of Mr Scheckter's savings without so far turning a profit.

I understand there is an issue with abattoirs as well. The big boys that serve the supermarkets all all inspected on site with embedded officials as I understand it??? There was a butcher near a friend who had a field out back. He would get the live beef in and let it settle for a week or so, live beef thinking "nice here", "grass is great" etc etc not getting stressed and calming down then before it knew what was happening it was in the pot.

But the butcher had no end of issues with inspections on the slaughter side of things from the officials, so much so it was becoming a hindrance. I believe he retired.

There were several good butchers in town when I moved away some years ago, I moved back and many have gone. In the last few years we went down to one in the market but another has recently opened up. But you cannot fail to notice that when you are shopping in tesco (for the items you have no choice with) the amount of clear boxed joints and cuts in peoples trollies. That footfall would be better in the local butchers but it ain't going to happen.

I find some cuts a bit over the supermarket price and some on par, you eye the prices as you do. The quality is certainly better, I cannot always shop in town and a late finish means the supermarket isles. There is sometimes the option of getting black beef or home reared pork etc in town, which is absolutely superb but I understand Black beef has become a bit of a thing in the big smoke? Even the ordinary cuts are sublime compared to the supermarket. But, do people really care anymore?

And home made sausages, superb....... I understand the dragon sausages from one of our butchers (forget which) had the EU officialdom all over them like a rash at the Royal Welsh or winter fair? Apparently there were no real dragons in the sausages.....

[Kermit power]

I think butchers have a very different set of additional problems to contend with compared to other small retailers, most of which come down to consumers not knowing much about meat, and supermarkets being happy not to educate them.

Right at the most fundamental level, for example, meat is sold by raw weight. Supermarket meat will be greatly cheaper per raw kilo than decent meat from a good butcher. Once you've cooked it, however, and all the excess water in the supermarket meat has been cooked off, the cost per cooked kilo will start to appear more favourable to the butcher.

Then you get things like aged beef. There's a huge difference between dry and wet aged beef in terms of cost of preparation, quality of end product, and also again the amount of water lost during cooking. Annoyingly, supermarkets are able to trumpet "28-day aged beef" in their premium ranges despite the foul stuff being aged in vacuum packed bags, giving nothing like the result of dry-aged beef. Even before taking into account their economies of scale, it's cheaper to produce, cheaper to store and can be stored for much longer, so the playing field is unbalanced.

People need to understand that they're not looking at a like for like comparison when they compare butcher to supermarket, yet sadly they don't look beyond the price label. I started out thinking I'd rather have a bit less superb meat than huge gluts of cheap & nasty crap. Now, however, through a combination of the likes of HFW and a decent local butcher, I've realised I can have all the meat I want, so long as I'm willing to cook it a bit longer and use cheaper cuts. They almost always taste nicer, and it's easy to bulk cook them to freeze for later, thus saving lots of preparing individual meals. What's not to like?

My ideal high street would have a quality butcher and fishmonger plus a couple of clothes shops (I'm happy with the likes of Timberland & Fatface - not quirky enough to want independent boutiques), a good independent bike shop, a barber and some decent pubs (at least one of which would play regular live music), cafés & restaurants. Everything else, I can get on Ocado & Amazon, and am happy to do so, especially if it results in lower rents and the like for the people I do want in my high street.

[Changedmyname]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

I. WISH. WE. HAD . A .HIGH. STREET. BUTCHER.

Hang on where are you......oh.

[Johnnytheboy]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

I. WISH. WE. HAD . A .HIGH. STREET. BUTCHER.

Our village of <3,000 people has an excellent butcher, despite there being a town with another and a supermarket 3 miles away.

Helps that he seems to be a hit with the ladies of the village.

[deadslow]

Go to Peebles and you'll appreciate just how great a real town centre can be. Stacks of diverse local independent shops rather than the generic 'everytown' chains.

Folks who cannot appreciate independent retailers generally also believe the seats in restaurants need to be bolted to the floor.

[Deva Link]

Johnnytheboy said:

Our village of <3,000 people has an excellent butcher, despite there being a town with another and a supermarket 3 miles away.

When we moved here there were three in our village of 2500 people, but they've all long gone now.

Johnnytheboy said:

Helps that he seems to be a hit with the ladies of the village.

That must be what they all rely on now - there's one that seems to thrive in a nearby village and both the owner and his son have a bit of a reputation!