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The New High Street 

Words Krystle Sarkodie

I was never a fan of online shopping, I liked to go into a shop and see the clothes, touch the clothes, drape the dresses on my body and envision the complete look but that’s all been flipped on its head due to the lockdown. We have all become online shoppers allowing the likes of Boohoo, PLT and co to help pull together our lockdown looks but what is happening on the High Street.

Yes, restrictions have been eased, and the High Streets have been opened but there has been a massive decline in the footfall, in April of this year football was down by 83.3% on UK High streets and 68.1% in retail parks (BBC, May 2020) but there has been an increase of 51% in the footfall since the High Street reopened (Fashion United, June 2020). Understandably shoppers are still maintaining social distancing and are more cautious to go to places which may be crowded, so this will cause a number of shoppers to remain home and online shop but hopefully now that the government has announced that face masks will be mandatory in stores from 24th July will give shoppers more confidence to step out and onto their local high street. 

Even though the high street is open, many retailers have suffered through the lockdown and their businesses where unable to reopen especially retailers who were already struggling before we went to into lockdown, such as Laura Ashley, Debenhams and Oasis Warehouse – who fell into administration over the last couple of months (Reuters, April 2020). Now the view on many high streets are empty shops. Independent shops have not been able to keep their business open due to the loss of income, even though there is government help there are several businesses who are still suffering because they were only starting out. 

The government has pledged to slash VAT from 20% to 5% for food outlets in order to increase the footfall and get people going out again but still this is not enough, some businesses cannot afford to pay their staff when they come back to work because they will not have the same number of customers coming through the door meaning they will not have the some income coming in. There has been payment holidays given and government funding for businesses based on their earnings from the previous year but the fact still remains that customers are not coming through the door; therefore, businesses are having to close. 

Where do we go from here? 

There is a positive side to this, as we have seen a boom in the digital world from Zoom Calls to Tik Tok to google hangouts, retailers are also taking advantage of this with floods of emails of new discount codes and extra savings on next day deliveries. This could be the death of the High Street and the beginning of the online marketplace which then allows smaller businesses to then save on the costs of paying business rates and rent for spaces and now put that finance into building an online community. 

For the bigger retailers they have closed their smaller branches in order to reduce their outgoings and plug their cash flow into other areas, shops such as TopShop has closed down several of their smaller shops and franchises and have now focused their energies into their Flag Ship stores across the country – this means that they have had to let a lot of staff go but this means then save more money. 

The High Street is now a new canvas and the opportunity has now risen for a new type of retailer to emerge one that allows the consumer to control of where and how they spend their money; we will most probably see more Pop-up shops as this will allow retailers to reduce their outgoings and not have to enter into long-term tenancy agreements which no break clauses. Covid has allowed a reinvention of the high street, so now we watch and wait to see how we can create a new shopping experience for consumers.