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Things which we think we’d miss … but probably wouldn’t

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I’ve read the thread about British retail with interest, including the sense that we’ll miss WH Smiths and/or the High Street experience if they disappear.

This is a position which is often quoted about something which is seemingly integral to our lives – such as the BBC.

I wonder, though, if it really holds water?

For instance, I doubt I would miss the BBC that much. I get my daily fix of news online (never from the BBC website, which is pretty woeful), I have entertainment options coming out of my ears, and music which I don’t own is a mouse click away.

Similarly, with the High Street experience. If the population truly valued it, it wouldn’t be in its death throes.
However, the reality is that, for the most part, people prefer shopping online. It’s cheaper, it’s easier, the and customer service is generally better.

Are we just trying to hold on to entities which have previously been the foundations of our lives but which have failed to keep up with our changing habits and lifestyles … and we’re just disconcerted about the (potential) disappearance of such foundations, rather than actually needing or wanting them?

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  1. My only recent experience of British retail dates back to Feb 2020, before we went into lockdown. Presumably things have got even worse. The high street in Folkestone, where I live when in Blighty, is like pretty much everywhere else – dim and depressing. Charity shops, phone shops, card shops, gloomy WHS, ridiculously big Boots, Wilko, Shoe Zone, Entertainment Exchange, TK Maxx, Poundland, Costa…Debenhams, the town’s last department store, closed last year. The only presence M&S has in the town now is at the BP on the edge of town (much patronised by me via Deliveroo during lockdown – a bottle of whisky delivered to your door inside 20 minutes is a miraculous thing). And the massive Saga office building in the middle of town has just been sold, and that’s thousands of now working from home staff who will no longer be in town looking for lunch or whatever – the final nail in the coffin probably. I’d simply never bother to go there at all if it wasn’t for the Oxfam bookshop and the occasional raid on Waterstone’s.

    But the old town, centred round the Old High Street leading down to the harbour, seems to be thriving – that’s lots of small independent shops, restaurants, coffee shops etc. There seems to be a lesson here – more and more people no longer want shops they can find in any town in the country, except for the very occasional specific requirement, and as my generation dies off the next generations will want them even less. They want places where shopping can be akin to a leisure activity, rather than a grim chore, and where (dare I say it) the people in them, very often the owners, seem to be enjoying themselves.

    I’ve no idea what the answer is. John Lewis, unlike Smith’s, Boots etc, adjusted very well to online shopping, but it’s still on the skids, closing stores and laying people off.

    In my experience Australia has yet to reach this pitch of gloom. There are big national supermarkets of course, and big national electronics stores, and so on. But I still do most of the household shopping in local shops for local people. Amazon is yet to achieve the domination it has elsewhere – partly because half of the stuff it sells has to be shipped from the States. It’s really irritating when I forget to tick the Ships from Australia box.

    Haven’t really answered your OP question, have I? I suppose one thing I don’t and really won’t miss is hard copy magazines since the advent of Readly. I used to buy a lot – music, computer, Private Eye, New Staggers, the occasional car mag. I’m probably the reason WHS is failing.

    So there you have it – I’ve spent 20 minutes sharing my thoughts on British retail. Can you tell I have some actual work I should be doing?

    • We probably aren’t typical but we buy very little from the high street these days, in fact, we’re not big consumers of anything you could get there. We’ve probably had less than 10 online deliveries since Christmas and those were things we’d have struggled to buy locally anyway. In contrast, my brother says Amazon call every day of the week. For comparison, we are currently me, my wife and 17 year old daughter, although my 20 year old son was here until February. My brother’s house is him, wife, 2 x adult daughters and 2 x teenage foster kids. Even allowing for the extra numbers, I still don’t know why the hell they buy so much stuff.

    • Isn’t John Lewis struggling because they’ve kept shops open? If they’d just moved fully (or even mostly) online, they would probably be fine. It’s a case of finding the right balance. Next has managed to do it as have others.

    • My inlaws lived just outside Folkstone for a couple of years about 20 years ago. It was already a town of two halves. The old town was lovely, and included an independent music shop where I was a regular customer. The new town was, well, let’s just say somewhere I passed through as quickly as possible between the car park and the old town. Out of season it was even worse.

      Also, the local newspaper was proto-Farage and my Spanish mother-in-law was made to feel uncomfortable by the locals. They didn’t stay long. I don’t imagine Brexit has made it get any better.

    • Goodness me, the Saga offices at Folkestone gone, eh? My last site visit when I was in an IT consultancy job *mumble* years ago. I remember it as a fairly desperate place even then. Still, at least they’ve got a Waterstones which is more than my local town has. That shop drives me to despair but that’s because I invariably enter wanting something specific that they won’t have in stock, so no wonder the online retailers win out. What a good bookshop can do is put out stuff you didn’t know you needed, which means the best ones must be able to read their potential customers’ minds (hint: don’t just buy whatever’s currently being talked up in the literary pages of the newspapers).

      I don’t watch much BBC TV or listen to the radio, but then I rarely visit the library either and yet I think libraries are an overall civic good that need protecting. Some things simply enrich the tenor of our lives by their existence. That said, many commercial retailers deserve to go to the wall for their inability to apprehend the needs of their customers. There’s probably little future in physical shops for commodity goods, outside of the supermarkets. Almost all of those items are often more easily and cheaply sourced on eBay now (assuming international shipping doesn’t become too onerous post-Brexit).

  2. The question of whether or not you would miss is surely dependent on what, if anything, replaces it

    When I moved to the US, I really did miss the Beeb. Then I discovered NPR and PBS, and my grief dissipated, albeit still sad about the easy to find blend that you got from BBC – TMS, the news, Blackadder…

    I moved to Australia, and thankfully they have ABC, which I like, and SBS. Both host good quality TV, both home made and imported.

    Imaging the Beeb being replaced by that cunt Andrew Neil and GB News. You’ll be sorry then!

  5. Well we are obviously not all the same because I for one would miss hard copy magazines. I do not want to read a magazine on a kindle (or a book for that matter). Thankfully a lot of other people think so too given that physical book sales are at the highest levels.
    I dont like TV channels with ads and when I was in Australia I thought their mainstream tv was even worse than ours which is a pretty difficult achievement. Do like PBS though.

    • Well I read them on my full-size iPad, which is an altogether better experience than reading them on a Kindle. And it’s a relief not to be beset with waste paper. I still buy loads of actual books – things I read on my e-reader are books that would end up in the chazza. But each to his own, obviously.

      • Ditto newspapers. I like the print layout with everything where you can find it the next time you look news websites that constantly update and move stuff around just aren’t the same. I’d definitely miss that if it disappeared. I would hate to have to go back to the printed versions though. Even with the two magazines I subscribe to the paper versions of, I tend to read more on my tablet than from the printed page.
        Reading newspapers and magazines on a Kindle is a nightmare though.

        • I read the Graun app, which is much more newspaper-like than the website version. Apart from the Times on the plane from London, I haven’t read a hard copy paper for years.

    • Me too @SteveT.

      I cherish my right to drop the latest NS or Eye into the bath water while trying to turn the page, yet still be able – after a suitable length of time with the mag perched on a radiator – to read the thing.

      I suspect that people who only use electronic devices to read things may have a tendency to be a tad whiffy due to a lack of proper bathing.

  6. The internet of people. If this site, Twitter, Facebook and every comments section and forum in the world shut down, you’d miss it for a week and then be hugely better off. You’d phone and text your friends instead, and use the internet for what it should be used for: Wikipedia, keeping fit and shopping.

  7. @DavidB

    Re ” I get my daily fix of news online (never from the BBC website, which is pretty woeful).”

    I’m curious – where do you go for your online news?

    I tend to go the ths BBC as the least worst (by a margin) option. On the occasions where I go elsewhere it’s mostly to the Guardian, athough it does irritate me increasingly frequently.

  8. I have been trained by, and a trainer for, the BBC, but never a direct employee. So I can see both sides. Yes, it is old and sometimes inefficient, but what large company isn’t?

    Almost every person working in telly, radio or cinema has been trained at the BBC Wood Norton training centre (a small university-style campus). ITV, being a collection of small independent content-generators, do not have an equivalent.

    Almost every technological invention in broadcasting – 625-line TV, PAL colour, FM radio, DAB radio, DTTV, HDTV – has been invented or championed by BBC Research and adopted as a worldwide standard.

    So think of the BBC as the talent pool. Every act that now plays the O2 arena started out playing the back room of the Portland Arms.

    • Agreed.

      While it obviously needs reforms – more creative program makers and less middle-managers – think we should cherish and do all we can to keep the BBC

      When you consider all the information, education and entertainment the Beeb provides 24/7 for just over half (43p) the newsstand cover cost of a daily copy of the Guardian (70p), it really is an incredible bargain.

      Let’s also not forget the fact that when a broadcaster produces as many howls of outrage from one side of the political divide as from the other, it must be doing something right.

  9. That great English obsession – house prices – is influenced by proximity to a lively physical retail sector aka a proper high street that is a destination in its own right. And if house prices get influenced by it, nice shopping streets will survive. The identikit high streets with all the same brands don’t fit that bill, but get the right mix of independents and, I would suggest, architecture and urban environment, and the town centre will survive, but it will be smaller. mikethep’s description of the Old Town in Folkestone sounds like it answers to that name. I am familiar with Pitshanger Lane in Ealing, which made it into my paper last weekend, and it is not just a pleasure to shop there, it reflects that glow onto the suburbs around.
    My local small town, which I use for everything possible, has weathered the last year remarkably well; it’s felt safe and welcoming. But of course there’s the usual catch. These smaller high streets survive if they have a large enough middle class catchment.
    Levelling up, anyone?

  10. I suspect we are fairly typical – walk into town once a week to shop at the local butcher and greengrocer as we try to avoid supermarket fodder if we can, and we have a good health food shop where we can also get refills of stuff like washing up liquid, and there is a new zero waste shop which we try to use, then get everything else at the supermarket on the edge of town . We regularly bemoan the fact that another shop has gone….then shop online for stuff.

    Two banks are now closing too, HSBC and Barclays, so even less reason for people to go into town. Town centres will need to be repurposed, although in a sense that is happening already with more and more places to eat and drink. As above, hopefully we can encourage shops which offer a different experience – the chains like Smiths are dead in the water.

  11. Surely the last year has been an experiment in how much we can do without for extended periods. I miss shops and town centre a fair bit, pubs and restaurants about the same, gigs and holidays a great deal, but (so long as I have my other half) people not so much. Others’ priorities will of course vary.

    Access to utilities, food staples and various health services obviously come under the heading of things we think we would miss and too bloody right we would.

    Sometimes I minor thing like a favourite product bearing the dreaded words ‘new and improved recipe’ can feel like deprivation, but so long as you’re lucky enough to live in comfort a lot of what we take for granted can vanish.

  12. I’ll certainly miss the high street, if retail disappears.

    Buying clothes online is awful – the colours are always different to the picture, and the fit is usually terrible. And no – it’s not my fat gut that’s at fault. It’s my thin arms.

  14. Kings Heath High St was I think the ‘Principles shutter’ photo on the BBC website but now can’t find it. Anyway, we have indeed recently lost Principles, JD Sports (only open a few years), Bonmarche, Burtons etc. There is indeed a grim Smiths/Post Office and sad Boots and a vibrant second hand sector with CEX, topbanana vintage clothes, the Polar Bear for music and the charity shops. Independent shops such as the butchers, and several bakeries and cafes seem to be doing fine, and once we can get the Hare and Hounds back open I think KH (and indeed Moseley which is almost entirely food and drink) will be ok.

  15. Been trying to think of something to add here. Something I take for granted that I am curious about whether I could live without it.

    Two for me. And I’m not sure how I would feel if either disappeared:

    Cinemas.
    I still love the cinema. It focuses you on a film, lets you see it in the best possible sound and picture quality (well, should do), and forces you into a little dark secluded haven away from the world due to the need to turn off your phone, etc. Unless the film is exceptionally bad, I always feel rejuvenated after a cinema trip (alone or with others) and I miss it dearly.
    But it might well be an industry that dies soon. I think I would probably make the transition to just watching download/streaming films and buying blurays. But I think I would always feel uneasy, as if something is missing from the experience.

    Concerts.
    I think, honestly, I could probably live without concerts. I would certainly miss them, but I don’t think I hold them in the same esteem as a transcendent experience like many people on here (I suspect). For me, the record is the thing. In the long run I think I would far rather have an album by someone than see them in concert. I might change my mind and regret saying that though….
    I’m actually surprised there hasn’t been a far bigger boom in online concerts. I would have thought that would be an absolute shoo-in for making money and connecting with fans. I don’t mean silly little ad hoc youtube things, I mean proper events – get lighting and sound all professionally done, and create a live online event with a reasonable charge to stream it from home. Maybe I’m just unaware of acts doing this. I would pay a tenner, say, for an online Paul McCartney or Paul Simon or Tom Waits event where they just sat at a piano for an hour with a couple of musicians backing them up. Surely with the thousands of people online who would subscribe it would be worth their while to do this?

    • There have been some attempts at making online shows special events which play to the medium’s strengths, notably Laura Marling at Union Chapel. Now I would love to see Laura Marling play at Union Chapel but I just wasn’t interested in the online offer. It’s the same with the handful of live DVDs I have; they’re a pale shadow of being in the same room with hundreds or thousands of other people as a unique event is created in front of your eyes and ears.

      Part of the reason I miss gigs (as well as comedy shows, the opera at Covent Garden and whatever) is not just the evening itself, it’s having the date in my diary to look forward to, building up to it, then having a day in (most often) London, dinner then the show, before a late train home to Essex. Working up to an event I would watch in my living room just wouldn’t have the same excitement, even if I paid someone to come around and be obnoxiously drunk around me between curtain down and bed.

      On the other hand I went to the cinema precisely once in 2020, which is about the same as most years and more than in many. The only reason I see something in a cinema is if that is the only way to see it at all. Different strokes innit?

      • Yeah, actually thinking about it, what you say about the live event, having it your diary, the day out, etc, all makes sense. I suppose it would be the sense of occasion I would miss. I only go to one or two live concerts a year, though.

        • At the moment almost anything that’s live, out of the house and can be done in the company of friends and wider family. So:
          Restaurants
          Cinema
          Theatre
          Gigs
          The Pub
          Gigs in The Pub
          Live sport (especially the cricket)

          Could I do without these? This seems a bit like that thought experiment ‘would you rather go blind or deaf’. Its survivable but bloody hell life will be diminished without them.

      • One of the sort of positives to come out of the last year is an acceptance of live streaming events and a growth in both the tech and technicians to run it. In the short to medium term, a lot of events will have a streaming element which could be good for less popular acts who will probably never make it to far flung parts of the world but can stream to their fan base there.

        • I could get behind this. Like Arthur, I’m often left feeling a bit “Is that it?” at gigs but there are many international bands I’d like to catch who are unlikely ever to make it to the UK (especially now) and, if they do, will probably only play in London. Being able to watch them remotely from a comfortable chair, with decent sound and video (as opposed to phone cam bootleg quality on YouTube), would be a tremendous boon. I guess you lose some of the atmosphere, but better that than no show at all. Some of the Rockpalast and Ancienne Belgique shows I’ve seen on YT certainly didn’t suffer for being watched at one remove.

          • Additionally, there’s something very appealing about being able to stump up to support acts who really need the cash. Bruce and Beyoncé will get by just fine, but my favourite bunch of losers who haven’t seen any gig money in a year..?

  16. There’s quite a big difference between what you learn to live without and what you miss. I can live without a decent independent local record store, music shop, local arts cinema (not a cineplex thing), decent book store or independent newsagent but I miss them all a great deal.

    Twitter and Facebook etc. I would also learn to live without fairly quickly but I don’t think I would miss them all that much after a couple of weeks.

    I miss gigs like crazy – both the chance to watch them and more occasionally, play them.

  17. The royal family. If the whole edifice was discontinued apart from the Govt business of the day, I don’t think we’d miss it.

    Perhaps when the Queen shuffles off, Charles, William and Harry could collectively stand down, move out of the royal households and get a really nice flat each. No parades, no Trooping of the Colour, no Changing of the Guard. I maintain that the Queen likes these things because she likes horses. Buckingham Palace becomes like the Tower of London – no real function any more but a fascinating place to visit.

    • In Kathmandu they have this thing where an actual goddess makes an appearance on a balcony once a day. They miss a trick in not monetising it. We could sack all the royals except one – one of the more photogenic ones, like that nice Kate – and have them waving from a Buck House balcony every day at 4.00pm, April-October, with full trooping of the colour and brass bands and big furry hats all round, then charge American and Chinese tourists £40 to watch it, with a commemorative tea towel thrown in. The whole things pays for itself.

  18. Things I won’t miss if they ever go away: fire hydrants, motorbikes, traffic lights, bicycles, hills…

    And online forms that scream at you in red letters that you haven’t filled them in properly when all you’ve done is enter the first letter of your email address.

  19. A friend and I used to say we’d always be alright whatever happened, as long as there was beer, cricket, and girls in their summer dresses. Well you can’t go to a pub, the cricket’s played behind closed doors and the third one’s a thought crime.

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