Leigh Sparks: Online shopping revolution may provide our local businesses with lifeline

THERE are really two things going on in the high street. If you listened to Sir Philip Green’s announcement yesterday morning, what he was saying was that he has a lot of stores in the chain with leases coming up in the next three years or so.

The effect of that is – given the rental levels and the lack of consumer trading – every retailer is looking at what stores do they need and what high streets should they be in.

So there is structural change going on in terms of how many stores retailers actually need, and that is the first thing that is going on.

The second point is that internet shopping – and within that mobile shopping – is increasing. So we are seeing continual growth in the online channel and quite a lot of that growth has been multi-channel blending – the ability to buy something online as well as in a store – by fashion retailers.

Those retailers are really selling the brand and are not worrying what channel is used to buy the products.

These two things are very big structural changes and the net effect is going to be a need for fewer shops across the country.

For individual locations, this is potentially a bad thing, because it means high streets have a lot of vacant property and it depends how quickly people are willing to accept that parts of town centres have to be re-imagined into new components, whether that be housing, whether that be leisure or something else.

In Scotland, in some of the rural locations as lots of retailers pull out, I think were are going to see more localisation of shopping.

So we are going to see the community having to come together and we may see more community stores put together by local people coming up and filling that gap.

That is what has been done in Dunbar, East Lothian, with its community bakery.

We may see local stores developing drop-off functions where people can pick up stuff that they have bought online.

Another big increase in online shopping has been click-and-collect and click-and-reserve.

You buy it online, but you go to the shop to pick it up. There will be a lot of experimentation about how to deliver items ordered on the internet.

This is the biggest structural change we have seen since the 1970s when out-of-town retail was developed.

What we are seeing today affects town centres, but it also has the potential to affect out-of-town locations as well.

We are seeing a change in the way that consumers are behaving and it is exacerbated by the recession.

There is this double structural change where retailers are looking at whether they can get value out of the stores they are in, given the rental prices.

We are going to have to look a town centres very carefully and think what it is that will attract people into town centres and recognise that some of the secondary and tertiary streets are never going to be what they once were.

How do we get more people in? We must reuse the high street and get those people back in.

It goes without saying that when they are half empty, they are not very attractive.

• Leigh Sparks is professor of retail studies at the Institute of Retail Studies at the University of Stirling.