Is the British High Street finished as a buisness model?

Going, going gone... 

High Street shops are going, is the end of bricks and mortar retail?

We have recently seen BHS, House of Fraser and Toys R Us essentially go bust, Debenhams limps on ( I predicted it would be affected some time ago), the question is, is there any future in High Street retail outlets other than existing in the form of Coffee shops and Charity shops?

20 years ago I worked for a small but highly important supplier of food products to the major suppliers like Heinz and the leading supermarkets such as Marks and Spencer. This supplier had been bought and amalgamated with another supplier by an investment group to sell on.

A major manufacturing company bought the supplier I worked for and my thoughts were it was going to asset strip it for the brand labels and substitute the products with lower quality ones. I was proven right. Some key staff were retained due to their business relationships with the customer base, but the majority of staff were disposed of through redundancy due to duplication.

That was when the internet in the UK was in its early years.

20 years later and the on-line market place is where it is largely at. A supplier my present company deals with told me that 95% of their commerce traffic is now done on-line without any human intervention. This supplier has recently built a massive warehouse in Holland where no human staff are employed. Automation and robotics is the new now.

This is the new business model. 

When Toys R Us went bust a while back, I was shocked. This should have been a retail chain that should have survived, but it failed, as a casualty of super sites, like Ebay and Amazon - effectively the planet's middlemen.

Ebay and Amazon allow listing of items on their site, the same items often, the buyer makes a choice built on sales performance but mostly on price, the cheapest wins the deal. When an Amazon seller sells as a 3rd party supplier without the goods being in an Amazon warehouse, Amazon has a double win. It achieves a sale and revenue without the hassle and cost of storing, picking and transportation issues and takes a bit of revenue.

Plus it also helps if your company is based in a location with favourable tax levels and laws which the High Street mostly does not.

The on-line boom is good for some companies, but the convenience of on-line retail has taken its toll of the bricks and mortar brands, such as House of Fraser etc. 

The on-liners can operate cheaper, they don't have to have numerous shop floor staff on hand even when customer foot fall is slack, they don't have the multiple stores' business rates, running costs, staff costs, they can buy in cheap and sell quickly on, they don't have big rents or big leases to pay for.

This is why a House of Fraser type of takeover was a good deal, a lot of Bricks and Mortar that can be sold off, brands that can be cherry picked by a buyer and then sold on, the liabilities and overheads can be sold or disposed of largely quite easily and quickly and the future direction decided on whatever the buyer's plan is.

If you run a chain of stores for example with dated looking products, relying on peak time footfall, you are going to be hit hard. And that's why Debenhams is a walking Dinosaur.

People are 'time poor' these days and why waste hours going to a town to shop and try and find a parking space at probably some high price, when you can order on-line and return the item if you don't like it? Without leaving your house.....

That's why the High Street is sinking, those with the disposable income (pensioners mainly) are shrinking as a population - the pre WW2 generation had maybe 2-5 plus children in a couple 'generation', in WW2 it was about 2 per couple 'generation' and in the 60's on, the ability to choose a family or not has altered the demographic downwards with many couples choosing no family as an option.

Shrinking the 'generational population' has potentially shrunk demand consumption of goods for those original to the UK, but is buoyed by those who have come to live in the UK.

As we have seen even the mighty FW Woolworths could not survive the onslaught of the web. It wasn't 'Amazon big enough' to offer what people wanted or might want, it didn't have the floorspace or the warehouse space to be an Amazon.

Where can the High Street survive? Well, in my view, only niche shops offering specialised or unique products (where there is a market to service supporting it) could survive. If you offer a service that other on-liners don't, clearly this is an advantage.

The bottom line is customer footfall - the punter coming into your shop and buying a product. We probably buy on-line from places we have never visited, never will and develop trading relationships with people we are likely ever to meet over the years. 

Another key factor is how you deal with customer returns and warranty issues, the High Street business is good at that, they have the face to face contact to do so, but the faceless on-line retailer has to also do that too.

The High Street can't always better on-line price, it suffers from the overheads of staff, premises etc. On-line retailing cuts out human intervention to such a degree it more than pays for itself. If any humans work there, they are either packing the order or just booking the courier collection more than they may select the goods, depending on the set up.

Automation and robotics is taking over, algorythmical seeding is transforming marketing massively, sending the results to the iPhone or tablet, human intervention is shrinking.

When proxy living and big data get a hold and we subsume our 'daily dross' to computers to deal with, that will be a game-changer. The on-line situation will literally expand explosively.

Unless your High Street shop can offer something unique and or cheaper, pull the shutters down and sell up. 

Is the 'Man child' and 'Woman child' phenomenon an insidious control-based plot?

Ok you heard it here..

Perhaps this is the matrix? -  read on...

Is responsibility being bred out of society? 

Is society engineering a dumbing down of people in order to fit a 'control agenda'?

Well, that's the question....

A few years ago, I worked for a farm machinery repair company and were asked to take a couple of senior school students for a few days of work experience, this was an eye opener for a few reasons.

Firstly, they came equipped with a two sides of A4 paper list of things they were not allowed to do. Things like not use power tools, only use hand tools under supervision, not boil a kettle (Yes, honestly!) and so on.

We dispensed with the list, showed them how to use a small number of tools and left them to it, no one was hurt and they learned something.

We did bypass the kettle edict and the result was that the student had no idea how to make a cup of tea. I am not kidding. No pun intended.

When we asked about the list, it seemed that at school it was the same story.

It dawned on us, 'so what happens when you leave school and go out into the real world?' and that was just it. 

Unless they managed to acquire skills over and above clicking a mouse or using a touch screen they were pretty much useless in practical terms. Not their fault, but a culture of removing peril amounts to conditioning people to take no risk, to just sit there and do nothing and be dependent on others to fix things.

For an authoratative body imposing a regime like this is worrying. Who says these edicts must be followed and what is their agenda? From what I have seen, to create a generation of useless and dependent citizens, who will be easy to control.

This is further compounded by parents who want their children to stay living at home even after having graduated, parents who can't or don't want to let go or form 'same plane' relationships with their children. You see the Mums who look like and almost the same age as their daughters having some 'sister' relationship, perhaps the mothers are trying to recover their lost youth?

The 'Man child' 'Woman child' situation is in some respects due to high house prices and affordable housing problems, but it is only part of the problem.

What this creates is a situation where the young have no desire to take any responsibility because they are cushioned from 'reality' of paying rent, a relationship, housing, doing all that supposed boring crap. Its easier to sit on a beanbag and play with a gaming console and have food and laundry done for you.

And we go back to our work experience.  I know millennials who have little or no practical skills, their parents do the DIY, check their cars over. So when they are pushing up the daisies, what then? A reliance on Robots?

We need to skill up our young, because if we don't we are finished as a society.

Age Verification will fail because of Peer to Peer porn.

Why Age Verification is doomed to failure.

We all want to protect under 18s from adult material but the ideals of age verification are doomed to failure for a number of reasons.

This legislation is aimed at protecting the most technologically aware group of people out there in society -  those mostly under 18 who have greater access to computers and who are being taught how to code -  if they know how to code, they can build their own apps and bypass the mainstream checks or use virtual private networks to do so. 

Even if Google closes references to 'adult material' sites, the under 18s will just get their adult material from elsewhere. Has no one thought of this?

This 'underground' situation will likely take place through apps, via Peer to Peer transmission, or by physical transfer through sharing on SD Data cards. 

The result is it won't stop the problem of under 18's getting hold of, distributing or holding adult material, it merely drives it underground and drives them potentially into harms way, the very opposite of what was intended by this bill.

Those under 18 often have little or no appreciation of what they are doing is wrong or unlawful, to them it is just something that they just 'do', without fully appreciating the consequences or implications of the material.

We are now seeing the under 18s using and distributing adult material on an industrial scale due to the rise in smart phone, tablet and lap top use, devices which are almost 'necessity must haves' for people nowadays.

Much as in the old days of sharing porno mags between your mates at school, now it is peer to peer sharing literally of data and material between devices. Like the old days, pretty much unstoppable.

The Age Verification system will be a dangerous thing for law abiding adults who may want to enjoy pornography for their own pleasure, their personal data and lawful adult interests could well be open to data collection and potentially useable as 'history' in legal cases unless this data is secure and not for third party disclosure.

We have seen many disgruntled employee data thefts and sensitive information about an adult's personal and private interests, especially if you are a celebrity for example, could provide organised criminals with means of coercion for financial gain. Or as we used to call it, blackmail. 

We may yet see our first suicide due to coercion from held adult material related data that has been stolen or sold on from any implied threats to expose or publish the information, blackmail and demands for money that the victim cannot meet or refuses too. 

Clearly this legislation situation needs a rethink. This legislation was formulated for the right reasons to protect under 18's, but is bad in that it could open up people's data history to unscrupulous exposure, an eventuality which cannot be ruled out by the data holder. 

Any savvy kid is going to get hold of a legitimate verification code and it will be passed on and on. So, the scheme fails there.

It does not stop the peer to peer transmission that is the norm now, so we read in the media.

Age verification may potentially expand to any UK website and that could be bad news if you say want to go onto Amazon's UK site to buy some H B pencils, but have to prove your age because that site carries age restricted products available to 18+ only. 

The age verification legislation appears to be badly thought out and unworkable, it will cause more problems than it likely solves.