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How internet shopping will kill the High Street. (But may just revive(Daily Mail Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)AS anyone who has battled their way through the January sales will attest, shopping on the High Street these days has become intolerable. It was Napoleon who first said we are a nation of shopkeepers, but what he failed to add was that we are the most useless shopkeepers on Earth. Our shops are staffed by the most surly, uncommunicative and ill-informed segment of the population. Computer shops are run by people who are confused by electricity. Televisions are sold by people who have trouble pronouncing their own names. Bookshops have staff who have never heard of the latest bestsellers. And that is if you can find any staff. Go into any of our DIY emporia on a Sunday and you will feel you have wandered into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. Tumbleweeds bowl down the aisles as solitary assistants flee at the terrifying sight of a customer who may ask a tricky question about paint. Then there's the problem of shops failing to stock the stuff we want. Why does it take three months to get a sofa, for heaven's sake? They can build space rockets faster than that. As far as I am concerned, there are two acceptable waiting times: today and tomorrow. After that, why bother? Even before the age of online shopping, it was easier to do your shopping by mail order if you didn't mind the wait. Britain's terrible retailers whine endlessly about falling sales, congestion charges and interest rates. But rather than moan, they could take a look at themselves and make a few changes. Because if they don't, they're history. For just as our chain stores have become lazy, inept and rude, so online retailers have flourished in the past few months to the extent where I predict that the internet will be both the death and, paradoxically, the salvation of Britain's High Streets. FIRST, though, a note of caution. The internet is more than three decades old and most of the predictions about how it would revolutionise our lives have not come true. But things are changing and the internet's power is especially marked when it comes to our shopping habits. Online shopping is, of course, far from being a new phenomenon, with Amazon, lastminute.com and eBay being familiar names. But the pace of change is staggering. The figures speak for themselves. In 1996 (a couple of years after most people realised the internet existed), just 0.07 per cent of retail spending (about GBP120million) was done online. Five years later, internet shopping had increased 20-fold to 1.4 per cent. Last year, we spent some GBP7.8billion, or about 3 per cent of our cash, via our computers - and this figure does not include banking, insurance, travel or other High Street services. In a few years, one pound in every ten will be spent online. The impact is already being felt on the High Street. Shops selling music, DVDs and books are taking a big hit. HMV's chief executive Alan Giles has resigned after a disastrous sales slump and its High Street book giant --Waterstone's is hurting, too. This Christmas, Amazon sent more than ten million orders - a 25 per cent rise on the previous year - as High Street stores struggled to compete. Similarly, Tesco revealed that its online sales of non-food items such as books, DVDs and CDs increased 50 per cent in the build-up to December 25 as Britain's total internet spending almost doubled to GBP5.2billion over the Christmas weeks. So why is the internet - finally, after all the hype - starting to bite into Britain's retail apple? Part of the answer lies in broadband, which has overtaken dialup access in popularity. While buying online was a tiresome pain with a dialup modem, faster and more secure computers combined with highspeed internet access now make dealing with the likes of eBay or Amazon a breeze. Then there is choice. Ten years ago you could go online and buy CDs, books and air tickets. Now you can get just about everything - even obscure items. Yesterday I managed to buy online a vacuum cleaner, some modelling clay and a half-price mini-stereo. This took me about ten minutes. I live in London, but even here, where everything can be bought from shops, tracking down the goods on this shopping list in person would have taken several hours. So is the High Street doomed? Not necessarily. In fact, I think something more interesting will result: the internet won't kill our town centres, it will save them. Think about what shopping must have been like 100 years ago and who did that shopping. The poor didn't 'shop', except to buy the necessities of life. Nor did the rich shop in the way that we traipse the streets. They usually had things delivered. Such shops as there were sold perishable goods, luxury items, specialist clothes and other goods that had to be obtained in person. These days will return. First, though, will come the purge. As internet shopping takes off, we will see a slow but steady disappearance of our High Street staples. The travel agents will be among the first to go. Then the record and computer shops will follow, except maybe flagship centres which will act as adjuncts to the online arms of the companies. As more generic goods can be bought safely online, the whole raison d'etre of hiking into town to get them will vanish. Albums, iPods, books, clothes, gadgets and white goods - all these will be bought almost exclusively over the internet. Then the supermarkets will get their act together and finally make online grocery shopping work (hint: try offering accurate 20-minute delivery times). My guess is that in as little as 25 years we could see our High Streets returning to how they were before the chain stores took over, with the reappearance of fishmongers, grocers, proper butchers and the small, specialist retailers that once made every town in Britain different. It's already starting in America, even in cities like Los Angeles, which were blighted by the car and the out-of-town mall for so long. NOT everyone agrees that the internet will kill off chain stores. According to Richard Hayman, of retail analyst Verdict, I have forgotten one salient point. 'Shopping is not about the procurement of goods,' he says. 'Shopping is about women. Women do not go shopping to get things, they go shopping to look.' Fair point. But that's ignoring two other facts and trends. First, half the population are men - most of whom, I suspect, will desert the High Street in favour of the internet's efficiency. They will return only once it has been swept clear of the shoddy service that has blighted Britain since the 1960s. Secondly, as they juggle the commitments of work and home, fewer women have the time to spend whole days traipsing round chain stores. So by 2030, say, the Nexts and Gaps, Hallmarks and Dixons will be rarities. What we will get instead is not a lack of shops, but better shops. Is it too much to hope that the internet will kill off the boring shops, leaving High Streets open to the convivial bookstore, the butcher, the baker and, who knows, even the candlestick maker? |