Why retailing is not dead yet

Some shop owners have stopped complaining and started innovating. That may yet save our high street.

It has been a long time since anyone could make any money from owning a shop. From Woolworths to Comet, a whole string of them have gone bust in the past decade. Customers have switched to buying everything online. Business rates have risen relentlessly higher, squeezing profits. Staff have become more and more expensive as the minimum wage keeps on going up. And property developers through the 1990s and 2000s built too many shopping centres and out-of-town retail parks.

But perhaps the real problem in retailing was not the competition or punishing taxes. It might be that there just hasn’t been enough innovation – and that shop owners are themselves responsible for the decline of their industry. There are a few signs that a few retailers at least are starting to get that – and instead of just complaining are trying out new ways of selling things.

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Matthew Lynn

Matthew Lynn is a columnist for Bloomberg, and writes weekly commentary syndicated in papers such as the Daily Telegraph, Die Welt, the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post and the Miami Herald. He is also an associate editor of Spectator Business, and a regular contributor to The Spectator. Before that, he worked for the business section of the Sunday Times for ten years. 

He has written books on finance and financial topics, including Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis and The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031. Matthew is also the author of the Death Force series of military thrillers and the founder of Lume Books, an independent publisher.