brighton town centre turning into a ruddy GHOST TOWN

[desprateseagull]

my sources say new firms lined up for C.Sq.. bit laer for the xmas rush tho.. planning #fail!

 

[desprateseagull]

who wastes miney at the cinema nowadays? could probably buy (and KEEP!) dvd shortly after release, for same or lower price than a cinema ticket, and an overpriced snack.

 

[clapham_gull]

Unless we are all quite happy with Tescos being the only shop on the high street, I'd have thought it would be in everybodys' interest for loss leading to be made illegal.

The death of the high street is a national scandal.

 

[Cpt. Spavil]

How do DVD rental shops keep going? You can buy so many DVDS (admittedly not new releases) for around the £4 mark online, which is almost the same as the rental price. Surely their days are numbered too, especially with people renting new releases through TV packages like Virgin as well?

dont forget about games that you can rent so they prob make up thru that

 

[Cian]

Sussex Stationers are struggling because they are crap

Their parent company are clattering towards the wall at an alarming rate also (Eason) so they could be either sold for a pittance or vanishing shortly.

 

[Bluejuice]

former borders shop- empty
former zavvi shop- empty
former luggage shop or whatever it was- empty
former george shop- empty

4 massive sites smack bang in the centre of town all sitting there, it's turning into bloody CROYDON or sumfin :US:

Actually, having worked in Croydon last year I was embarrassed by just how much of a proper high street they still have. Shops aplenty in downtown Croydon, and decent ones too. Their House of Fraser is enormous and new shops were popping up all the time. They even have a very good Waitrose now.

The sad truth is that Brighton is failing as a shoppers destination as Churchill Square is SHIT, parking is far too expensive, if it's even possible and all the individual quirky shops of the Lanes and North Laine are being driven out of town by exorbitant council rates.

North Street is starting to look like the hideous mess that is London Road.

I fear for the future of our once great city

 

[Chicken Runner61]

I read a few weeks back that Amazon are going to be opening high street shops in the UK.

Presumably as they helped put Borders out of business they will now get their shops at a lower rate.

 

[clapham_gull]

I read a few weeks back that Amazon are going to be opening high street shops in the UK.

Presumably as they helped put Borders out of business they will now get their shops at a lower rate.

Like Argos apparently....

Instead of having to stay in or have the books delivered at work, you can buy online and pick up later.

My brother has always said that Argos were years ahead of everyone else and in a way he was right.

Was easy for them to adapt to pick up internet sales because it was the way they sort of operated anyway, except the terminals were in the shops and not at home.

20% of the internet sales are picked up in store.

 

[Bluejuice]

When was Brighton ever great? It must have been before I was born.

Facts are that as much as we all love it because, in the majority of cases, it's home, it's actually a bit of a hole and there are plenty of better places to live.

Tosh. If our city wasn't great then why is it so full of out of towners choosing to make it their home?

I still always get that "really, you're an ACTUAL local?" look whenever I meet new people

 

[Bluejuice]

Nobody's calling it an idyllic paradise, it's just a nice city. We're a seaside town with some really great features. A lot of it needs tarting up and there are inevitably housing estates which aren't pretty but that's the same across the entire country.

I don't know of another city in the UK that I'd be happy to live in. If I left Brighton I think it'd have to be for foreign shores

 

[Southover Street Seagull]

When was Brighton ever great? It must have been before I was born.

Facts are that as much as we all love it because, in the majority of cases, it's home, it's actually a bit of a hole and there are plenty of better places to live.

Name some in the UK then.

 

[Guy Fawkes]

Digital books won't take over unless they become a lot, lot cheaper. I see little point in buying a gadget for a couple of hundred quid and then pay the same price for the downloadable book as you'd pay for a paper one.

Mind you, I might not be the best person to comment on this. I love books, I love the feel of them and the smell of them. I can't see any circumstances in which I'd buy a digital book in place of a paper one.

New technology like a digital books gadget always starts off expensive but usually fall in price after the initial research and development costs have been recovered.

I can see this becoming more the normal as with music downloads and maybe the cost of these digital books downloads will end up like that for music which started around £10 for CD albums and dropped to about £3 for the download. I suppose its what people get used to and see as the norm, when music downloads started, people said that stores would survive because people like to have the pyshical album / CD but times they are a changing.

In 2000, King published a serialized novel, The Plant, over the Internet, bypassing print publication. I think you could download each part if you paid a nominal fee and it was released in installments. Maybe this was too far ahead of its time, but it could be the future for the industry?

 

[Guy Fawkes]

Nah what's killing the likes of Zavvi/borders is the supermarkets as much as anything. People still love browsing ad the immediacy of buying something, taking it staight home and bunging it in the dvd/cd etc.

Or were they just too big to be that specialised? That extra space to fill means that they had alot of stock that was acting like a space filler in stores because demand for it would be so low. But they still had to pay rates, lighting, heating, staff costs incurred by that extra space for little returns.

Smaller stores may have been better but could have included a way to order instore for future collection or have it sent to the customers addresses (especially for the rarer titles) so customers could still get some help and advice from store staff if they wished.

Places like Tesco thrive by maximising revenue from every square foot of space in their stores. If a product doesn't sell well or an alternative would sell better, then it is replaced with a new line. This helps their overall profitablilty and allowed them to market loss leaders on other areas like music and DVD when trying to establish themselves as a destination to buy from rather than the normal high street alternative.

Being out of town means lower overheads too, maybe councils could match the rental / rate costs etc for both areas to help the High Street to compete and survive or will we see more out of town shopping centres crop up to take over from the High Street completely?

 

[pishhead]

We're in a recession so people are being more savvy with their purchases so whereas before if you needed a bicycle pump you would instinctively go to your local bike shop or halfords. People now have the internet where they can find it at a cheaper price and without having to leave the house.

Not enough companies are diversifying and shops are being left behind the times.
Regarding the empty shops in the city centre Brighton is in dire need of a big name department store to come in and completely rejuvenate the area. Part of Brighton's appeal as a shopping destination are the quirky shops that are found in the lanes/laines but the highstreets are now looking tired and downtrodden.

 

[GNF on Tour]

I agree. There is far more commercial property than is needed - not just in Brighton.

What should be done is convert some commercial properties to accommodation. On the continental mainland, people live in city centres, here they rarely do. Brighton in particular is struggling to find space to build houses and flats and converting shops and offices could help.

Is the correct answer. This trend is happening all over the world, I hope some visionary Council will be daring enough to change swathes of its commercial and reatail town centre space into residential and make town centres actually 24 hour people zones again........like back when I was a kid.

 

[Kalimantan Gull]

Or were they just too big to be that specialised? That extra space to fill means that they had alot of stock that was acting like a space filler in stores because demand for it would be so low. But they still had to pay rates, lighting, heating, staff costs incurred by that extra space for little returns.

Well, as I said earlier, being specialised used to be profitable as you could make a load of money selling Harry Potter and celebrity autobiographies. If everyone is picking those up at Tescos then your profits are slashed and you can't afford those overheads. Net result? The only places that sell books will stock nothing but Harry Potter and celebrity autobiographies. Dumbing down, anyone

 

[Gwylan]

New technology like a digital books gadget always starts off expensive but usually fall in price after the initial research and development costs have been recovered.

I can see this becoming more the normal as with music downloads and maybe the cost of these digital books downloads will end up like that for music which started around £10 for CD albums and dropped to about £3 for the download. I suppose its what people get used to and see as the norm, when music downloads started, people said that stores would survive because people like to have the pyshical album / CD but times they are a changing.

Yet CDs still exist, more than 10 years after downloads came into being. I bought several CDs over Christmas and the new year - I just buy them from Amazon rather than shops.

I've still never bought a download. I'm not alone in this: most of my friends don't even have an MP3 player although that's an age thing and we're fighting a losing battle. However, I'm sure there'll always be people who like holding something tangible and I think CDs (or whatever the medium will be) will be around in 39 years time.

I think books are slightly different, there's definitely an aesthetic appeal about books and even if the price of readers was drastically reduced and book downloads cost a fraction of the price of books, there would still be a demand for paper books -although I'm not sure how many bookshops will survive.

In a few years, we'll see the end of high street bookstores, record/CD shops, travel agents, wine shops (the closure of Threshers, Unwins and Bottom's Up is just the start), electronics shops and several more - there are several stories in Brighton that must be vulnerable - Sussex Stationers is just the obvious one. It's also likely that there'll be more restrictions on the private motorist in the future, making it even less likely to go shopping in town centres.

This is a topic I find endlessly fascinating. My first job when leaving uni was for a supermarket chain, working in the department that decided where to locate stores. I was a number cruncher, doing statistical analysis of areas where we calculated how many customers we could expect to get and the revenue per square metre (this was 30 years ago, well before the days of Excel). I left the job years ago and yet still find myself interested in the business of retail.

 

[Weatherman]

But you forget that a very large number of people enjoy the act of shopping -its a day out, its a town centre to visit, its a social occasion, its a chance to browse, its fun. They said cinemas would die when video came out, but like all things it adapted and grew.

It's sad, not fun.