The High Street

The traditional High Street has always been a fair-weather friend. It thrives when wallets are loose, confidence is high and nobody is checking their bank balance before buying a scented candle they did not know they needed until five minutes ago. The moment belts tighten, it is the first thing to be quietly ghosted.

This is because it was built around discretionary spending that is now under permanent assault from online retail. Even in good times, the High Street is competing with a phone in your pocket that offers lower prices, infinite choice and delivery by tomorrow. When money tightens, that competition becomes fatal. People do not browse shop windows when they can price-check them in three seconds from the sofa.

What people do not stop doing is eating, fixing things, cutting hair and living their lives. You cannot download a haircut. You cannot stream a kebab. You cannot post your cracked phone screen to the cloud and hope it comes back repaired. These are the businesses that survive both recessions and Amazon.

Multicultural high streets grasp this instinctively. They trade on volume, value and frequency, often blending eat-in, takeaway and delivery. They use online as an extension of the street, not a rival to it. Click-and-collect, delivery apps, WhatsApp orders. The High Street as a physical base for online trade, rather than a victim of it.

By contrast, the traditional retail core behaves as if the internet is an unfair interloper rather than the new baseline. Councils respond with loyalty schemes, parking discounts and stern letters to Jeff Bezos, as though he is going to read them and feel bad.

The cruel irony is that the same people who complain loudest about “the death of the High Street” are often the ones clicking Buy Now because it is cheaper. They want local shops for atmosphere, but not at local shop prices. They want choice, convenience and moral satisfaction, preferably bundled with free delivery.

Economic downturns do not kill the High Street. Online does that in normal times. Tightening belts simply speeds the process up and exposes which streets were selling things the internet cannot, and which were living on borrowed time.

The future High Street is not anti-online. It is post-online. It sells what cannot be shipped cheaply, downloaded instantly or undercut algorithmically. Everything else is already gone.