I think perhaps the biggest mistake the planners made in Thanet over the last 20 years was allowing far too much retail space without considering the dereliction left in the wake of doing so. What should be done now as it looks highly likely that a lot of the out of town retail at Westwood Cross has to fail I really don't know. Should we be planning for retail contraction back into the town centres?
I don't really know the answers but I guess looking back to now from ten years in future it will be obvious.
I noticed today that the chain that used to be Staples now Office Outlet has gone into administration. This is the link to the bbc news article obviously being from a nation of shopkeepers and kept by a small shop; this sort of thing interests me. I think there is a a shop size or perhaps a number of shop staff working at the same time in the same shop that develops a sort of Grace Brothers mentality. Well to be honest I'm not really sure at all, but I am doing something akin to using my tongue to explore this particular cavity in modern life.
Stationary wise and on the bookshop front, well since I can remember - which in view of my age, is the late 50s; the bookshop's stationary has always been delivered. In my family, the groanups mostly went off to work in bookshop or laboratory. I am just saying this to explain that the delivered business isn't new, bags, bubble wrap, brown paper buy the roll, white paper by the box of reams; well it was always delivered.
As an example here I use good quality A4 paper to print A5 local history booklets I usually buy 10,000 sheets at a time, this comes in boxes of 2,500 sheets which just fit in the the input drawer of the printer. I did try Staples as a commercial stationers but they weren't much good for the stationary needs of a smallish shop, I think they were aimed at something else. That said with most offices picking up the phone to their stationary supplier and the stuff being delivered, I could never see where Staples fitted in all that.
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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.