“Molti spazi commerciali vacanti sono dovuti allo shopping online. Per me è una delle cause principali della morte dei centri cittadini”
http://www.irishtimes.com/business/2024/09/22/a-lot-of-commercial-vacancy-is-down-to-online-shopping-to-me-thats-a-big-cause-of-town-centres-dying/
di That_Technician_439
41 commenti
This is probably true, but there are also a lot of lacklustre shops in small towns.
We need more flexible zoning laws.
Why can any pub be turned into residential with planning permission but not shops?
A lot of commercial vacancies is down to the lack of a real property tax.
In some cases its greedy commercial landlords holding out rents that aren’t sustainable in the current climate with online shopping.
In other cases, as stated in the article its: “A significant number are owned by families who are financially strong enough that they are not particularly bothered if they rent it or not”
Both those cases should be paying a significant tax each month the the point the vacant property is burning a hole in their pocked once its empty more the 3-4 months.
No doubt that retail is less profitable than it was previously but there are still people that’d be willing to start up a small business in the right conditions. It’s more common for places to only open 4-5 days a week so they can run leaner, there are loads of supports for small businesses.
Penalize vancancy, force them to lower rents or sell up and someone will use it.
Most town centers in Ireland seem surprised you’ve stepped out of your car.
We should be rebuilding towns that people actually want to spend time in, and purchasing will follow from there
Guess we should ban online shopping so, get back to the glory days of having to buy whatever shite your local shop had with a nice markup stuck on it too and staff that take your presence as an inconvenience.
Lack of imagination when it comes to business ideas (most people don’t want another greasy chipper, Chinese takeaway, barbers), coupled with rents that are often too high for the town/village.
Dispersed settlement patterns and some of the longest commute times in Europe are why town centres are struggling.
Consumer needs and wants have changed over many years. All those shops that went bust on the high street did not evolve to meet those needs. And now they are trying to make us all feel guilty that the high street is dead and want all of us to go out of our way to support dead business models.
Anyone else notice how hard it is to get anything in a shop anymore? Have no choice but to go on Amazon or the online shop. Even my toddlers shoes never have his size in Clark’s shop , never any socks for him anywhere, very few sizes of clothes also.
Definitely why online is taking over because it’s like shops gave up with stock since COVID
If there was maybe 5/10% between the online prices and shop prices, id prob buy local more but you can be talking 25+% difference and thats not to mention parking, availability and variety
Hope the remaining retailers are ready for Amazon.ie next year.
The half dozen towns I frequent locally all have the same issue. Parking. Any time I go to the town to do something the parking is far too short in supply, of poor quality (we all still drive Renault 5s apparently) and it’s paid. I get the idea of paid parking in somewhere like Dublin City centre, or in the middle of the larger towns like Mullingar or Naas, but the idea of having to pay to park in the local village so I can pick up a couple of small items from the local shops that are apparently “dying” is ridiculous.
Most of the clothing shops in Irish cities are terrible chain stores that carry the worst brands imaginable, these companies do not value Irish customers, we get served the worst cheap crap made in China and Bangladesh, t-shirts that shrink after one wash, knitwear that’s made of 50%+ polyester, Levi’s jeans that are so poorly made that they last about a year.
Consumers want cheap disposable clothes so this is what the market serves us.
In my opinion it’s far better to purchase more expensive clothes seldomly, clothes that will last a lifetime, I usually only buy 3 or 4 items of clothing a year, but a lot of consumers go to Pennys and spend €100 every weekend. So this is what we get on our streets and then people can just go on their phones and buy the latest trendy items online instead of going to Pennys, H&M so the bricks & mortar retail clothing sector suffers.
I know personally of two shops that closed down and blamed the likes of Amazon/Shein for it when the reality was they had absolutely no online presence whatsoever. No opening hours, no Facebook, no website with even just a phone number on it. Unless you were physically able to travel to their shop and they also had what you were looking for, they were of no use.
I called into one of them when passing by once and they didn’t have what I needed and when I asked if they could order it in, they said they would need far more than just one person to want it to justify doing that.
Small business owners just need to face reality and accept that an online presence is absolutely required these days.
If they introduced a significant commercial vacancy tax the problem would be solved overnight. But they won’t do that. The owners keep shops closed because it allows them to squeeze the market.
In my town one family owns a lot of the property on the main street. The only rent out for a very high rate. Anyone wanting to open in town has nowhere else to go. They also have their own shops in the town so keeping other premises closed is in their financial interest. They’ve essentially created a small monopoly in our town.
>When the former postman opened his pub Harley’s Cheers on Main Street 31 years ago there were three drapery shops across the road; all are long gone and one of the premises is now vacant.
okay?
>“A lot of it is down to online shopping. To me that is a big cause of town centres dying. Everybody’s kids do their shopping online,” says Harley.
ah of course its everyone else thats the problem, are the kids buying their pints online too mr harley?
edit because it gets better:
>“They do not want to work weekends and bank holidays. They got out of the habit and they realised there is a different life out there – and it is hard to blame them,” he says. “And there are 10 bank holidays now”.
absolute cope, nobody wants to work anymore…
Let’s be honest – most places are a chore to get to no matter which mode of transportation. and when you get there the selection is poor, the service is not great, and prices are too high.
Weird opening hours cut off anyone working 9-5 which, from a retail perspective, is just insane.
Online presence is laughable and websites are broken and half assed. No one seems to really put the effort into things – just the bare minimum, and the customers notice and take their business elsewhere.
And stupid traffic restrictions.
I think shopping centres on the edges of towns with tons of free parking huge modern shops and fast food places have also dealt a blow. America started this process decades ago whereas in Ireland, it looks like the donut effect and the impact of online shopping have happened at the same time.
It’s not really viable for shopkeepers, but if they dont offer the same variety and cheaper pricing than online options then why would anyone prefer to use them when you have to deal with the hassle of travelling to them and most of the time they dont have your size or the exact product you want, they need to evolve with the times to stay relevant…..
Landlords pay lower rates if their shops are boarded up. Property prices going up all the while so they can make money just sitting in it. Vacancy is incentivised.
For us, it’s hello kitty, nearly every birthday and Christmas its asked for. Only places to get it is online. The few shops that might stock some items charge 3 times the original price. It makes sense to order it off the Internet. Towns are dying because of landlords. I always thought that was obvious. I look at Dun Laoghaire as an example, it’s shopping centre has been empty for years. It lost many great places due to its ridiculous prices per unit. Its now mainly rented out to the hse. Taxpayers paying for the use of an overpriced eye sore.
Rates are crucifying local shops and businesses.
There are no kids shoe shops in Cork City any more. You have to go to Ballincollig if you want proper kids shoes.
You can’t tax the shit out of small and micro businesses for rates, insurance etc while giving a free pass to Amazon to operate on favourable terms.
We need to make it so that low intensity use can thrive in these spaces. If a retired person wants to sit in there all day running a book shop, or local artists need an exhibition space with a turnover of a few beans a week, it’s still a net good for a town.
We need to slash rates massively for small retail, fund the councils from the large business corporate tax pool, and create a tax-free rental scheme for these places, capped at a low level. In parallel, anybody with a derelict urban core property should be taxed punitively for up to 5 years, and if it is still vacant at the 5 year mark, it must be sold.
Do mainland Europeans not shop online or something?
Landlords are to blame.
Don’t need as many shops at all. We need benches, toilets, bins, green spaces, comfortable places to meet people outside without spending anything at all. Which would in turn encourage more community in town centres and more chance of buying a coffee etc because people would be near the shops more, they would want to be in town centres
Only the thought of having to drive, spend a considerable time and stressing up about finding a parking spot, or taking at least one hour to commute by public transport is enough to avoid town centres.
The only nice sit-in cafe/restaurant closed down in my town and everyone was genuinely devastated. Around lunch time you’d be hard pressed to even get a seat inside. And that’s saying a lot because it had over 60 tables! A downstairs, Upstairs and outside sitting area. It was the only place that felt like it had people from all walks of life. People on their work breaks, elderly people, kids in secondary coming down for their lunch, families, etc. Lovely staff who knew almost everyone. You’d get a real sense of community. Great food, coffee, milkshakes and pastries too. I’d pop down there atleast once a week either by myself, with my boyfriend or with a group of friends. They closed because they couldn’t afford the rent on main street! Even though they were doing the best business in town. So after that, I have no hope for small businesses in my town 🙁
Where I am there’s a few well established rich families that seem to be in a constant bidding war to buy up everything and leave it vacant just so the others don’t get it to do the same.
Total waste of perfectly good buildings.
Either go through the stress of trying to find parking, which is non-existent in my local town or buy online.
These towns have driven the nail into their own coffin
Parking inspectors have a lot to answer for. I couldn’t be bothered going to a lot of rural towns and rifling around for change to pay for parking before going into a shop to get fleeced.
It’s not online shopping. If it was then why is the same thing not happening across Europe?
The issues is county councils not investing in making towns centers attractive.
A few years ago Greystones in Wicklow and Wicklow town itself are 2 examples where businesses were struggling and the same trend was happening.
The Wicklow country council and local municipalities of the council used their funding and more importantly approved planning permission to increase pedestrian space on the 2 towns main streets, put barriers between the car and foot traffic and make dedicated spaces along the streets every business to have space out front for dining/ sitting / drinking etc.
They also improved parking within walking distance of the main streets.
Both towns are now very attractive for people to go to the main streets and are seeing businesses grow, more businesses open and the towns are thriving.
Greystones receives the least council funding per person in Wicklow and the roads are in a shite but they still managed it as a lot of the actions didn’t take much money to do. Just putting some lage potted plants by the road pushed cars away from the path and gave pedestrians space and was a huge improvement.
Every council in Ireland has the power to take simple actions like this to encourage towns to grow and make people want to go there.
Wicklow country council is doubling down on this success and replicating it in loads of smaller towns now too. Other councils could learn from this.
well, i was looking for a specific watch the other day, MSRP is 95 euros on the continent, here in shops that exact watch cannot be found under 300 euros. online: 75 euros. exactly the same, not a counterfeit or anything.
should i feel guilty for buying the item i want on-line?
sure, shops need business and they have overheads, i dont mind paying some kind of premium for that, but in this country it is just no longer affordable.
in ‘old’ times -say 20 years ago-, the missus would be out shopping, i might be in pub for a pint or 2, and we would meet at the end of the day for a bite to eat or a movie. now just the prohibitive cost of the pints alone make me stay at home.
Literally every time in the past 5 years when I go to the shop to buy something, they don’t have the colour or the size of what I want.
All of my shopping is just trying sizes of some garment or shoe (that’s of the wrong colour) and then I go online to buy that item.
I’ve been to JD sports to try Adidas shoes, get the size, and then go to Adidas to actually buy it.
I buy T-shirts in M&S, again, no size in my colour. I try size in white, then go online to buy blue & black.
Little shops simply cannot stock all of the stuff people want.
I’ll tell you one thing, we definitely need more coffee shops 😂
Landlords can say their property is worth more if they say the rent is X even if no one pays that. Dropping rents means less access to capital and it means lowering the value of their property.
It’s a problem the world over. The commoditisation of these properties, with large funds of money owning a lot of it, is disastrous for towns and home ownership. By selling online, you avoid all of this and the consumer benefits, but at the cost of their town becoming a shell of its former self.
People will do anything except acknowledge the absolutely huge difference in price between shopping local and going online. Irish retailers have gouged us enough.
Lots of places telling us to shop Irish but then charging 40% more than Amazon. What exactly benefits me from that deal?
Its high rent that’s the problem. I only go online when I can’t find what I’m looking for in store.
There used to be a suit shop in one of the local shopping centres near me, it moved to a new location due to its rent going up. The business that replaced it only lasted 6 months before closing and it’s empty space been vacant for over a year. All the shops that are empty it’s all down to high rent.