UK high street retail has been feeling the pain a while. Some retailers are doing well, but many aren’t enjoying changing shopper habits, local business rates and competition from online. UK retail vacancies are up but we probably have still have too many retail units.
High street is changing a lot already, and local council plans that are organised around “preserve the high st as it was” are probably doomed. Likewise retailers whose sole basis of competition is large range at lowest price, because the online does this with better margin at any given price point.
I don’t think the high street is dying, but the transition (to a more experiential thing?) isn’t going to be painfree. Perhaps some traditional sectors like grocery might weather the internet storm relatively well because the barriers to entry are highish (as Amazon has found in the last couple of years) and incumbents are used to surviving on razor-thin gross margins! Would guess they’re all trying hard to reinvent the back office a la Inditex, hard work though.