Things are not looking good for shops, especially the non food side of shopping, from personal experience during the period from about 1995 to 2005 the most difficult aspect of retail contraction is when the shops around you close.
With shops at the moment you just can't get away from the fact that here in the UK we have too much retail space, it's the opposite to the housing problem of having not enough housing.
With both of these problems it is the social spin off that is so problematic. Here at Michael's Bookshop in Ramsgate the problems of the the shops around us closing have gone long ago and our most recent problem was falling prices of books because of Amazon and Ebay.
This is also over now pretty much, I have been going through the 30,000 books in the bookshop checking the prices against the internet prices and making sure that our books are cheaper than the ones on Amazon and Ebay. This is the first time of doing this that I am reducing more books because of the time they have been on the shelf, than because they have become cheaper on Amazon, Ebay etc.
When we price books we look them up online to make sure the prices are competitive, photograph them all and put the photos on the bookshop blog, here is the link to the ones we did today apart form doing the obvious like seats so customers can sit down, it's a bit of a no brainer.
What's exactly going to happen when the knock on effect really grips Westwood Cross and Canterbury I don't really know. I can see Ramsgate's cafe culture overlooking the harbour and the main sands surviving fairly well as it isn't based on the surrounding shops, but towns that don't have something comparable...
a few photos from this evening's walk in Ramsgate, cold but at least it's light after work now.
Here is the link to today's photos
No comments:
Post a Comment
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.