Perfect 
The High Street is dying. Did The Internet kill it? No, it took its own life
simon gray — 2013-01-11, 08:35:28Back 15 years ago, when I used to be considerably more into stills photography than I am now, Jessops on New Street in Birmingham was my favourite shop; they had knowledgeable staff, catered well for both digital and chemical photography, but best of all, they had a massive front window stacked up with a wide choice of second hand cameras, lenses, and other equipment, at a good choice of price ranges.
Then the New Street branch closed, to be replaced around the corner by the Jessops ‘World Camera Centre’, which curiously with a doubling of floorplate space had a fraction of the stock – and big second-hand front window being replaced by a small second-hand glass case.
More recently over the last year or so, whenever I’ve gone into the Jessops World Camera Centre I’ve found the customer experience incredibly frustrating. The print-it-yourself machines not working, the lack of basic stock available, the immense difficulty of attracting the attention of a shop assistant, and when that attention is finally attracted, the shop assistant not having the faintest idea what I’m talking about (“what’s a flash bracket?”), or the most usual response “oh, we don’t have any in stock right now – we’ll have to order one in”.
And it’s not just Jessops where I’ve had that experience – that’s become my default experience from most shops which sell products I merely want rather than such as food and clothes actually need. Tech shops, camera shops, book shops, record shops (well, such as there are any record shops left), DIY shops, jewellery-making supplies shops, whatever – you name it.
When considering goods which people don’t need but want, the value of a shop over the internet is three-fold – the hope that the customer who needs advice can be advised by somebody more knowledgeable than themselves, the possibility that an impulse decision to want something can be satisfied immediately, rather than having to wait several days for it to be delivered, and the ability to handle the goods in advance of purchase – to check for oneself that the product on offer is indeed the product one wants.
But if the person in the shop knows less than you do, if the person in the shop says ‘sorry, we’ll have to order it in for you’, or if – as in the case of many bookshops these days – the product is sealed and shrinkwrapped so you can’t actually verify its suitability in advance, then what is the point in going to the shop to pay a third more than you could have paid shopping online in the first place?
It’s a curiosity that in the olden days when the owners of shops dictated what we could buy by their monopoly on the shopping experience, they still went to great lengths to ensure the shopping experience met our needs and encouraged us to buy from them, whilst nowadays the response of the High Street to the threat of the Internet is to just give up and blame the Internet for stealing its customers.
Our High Streets are indeed dying. Rather than blaming The Internet, it’s time our shop owners responded to the challenge it presents by shifting to business models which improve on the Internet’s offer, rather than just moaning about the fact of the Internet being better at selling things than they are.