When Andrew Robinson’s teenage daughter asked for a particular brand of make up for her birthday, he decided against buying online and chose instead to visit a department store where he could get expert advice from a well made up beauty consultant about exactly what to buy.
Personal service at the point of purchase is one of the reasons Mr Robinson, a commercial property specialist, believes the high street has a future.
“Retailers selling high value products, such as top end jewellers, can afford to spend face to face time with customers,” says Mr Robinson, a partner at East Midlands commercial property agent Andrew Granger & Co. “Buying something where you have the undivided attention of another person is clearly different to buying online.”
He believes retailers aiming to compete with the web should look to create a “coffee culture” where customers feel at home and looked after. “It’s the difference between just getting what you’re paying for and that little bit extra,” he says.
“Quality time with your customers, perhaps literally by having a cup of coffee with them, enhances the shopping experience.”
The high street still has a tactile advantage over the Internet, he points out: “Shoppers like to feel products, try them out and see the quality in person. It’s not about convenience because the Internet generally wins that fight. It means adapting to offer something more than just the product.”
Natural winners in the new era of the high street are retailers that sell what you can’t buy on the Internet – nail salons, hairdressers, restaurants and the like. Also doing well are the bargain basement stores and charity shops with the latter scaling up their operations and joining the market for bigger retail units. The losers are the squeezed middle that are neither providing an upmarket service nor competing with the Internet on price.
Success in retail is still hugely dependent on location but it is not impossible for the strong-minded to succeed where the footfall isn’t already there.
“To drag shoppers away from the retail centre of a town or city, you have to be something different in order to be a destination,” explains Mr Robinson. “They may be unglamorous businesses, such as carpet stores or builders yards but they are places that people have fine tuned into their minds as where to go to get what they need.”
Closer to the retail core, destination outlets can benefit their neighbours as well as themselves. “People might be drawn to a café with a special atmosphere and end up shopping in stores in the vicinity that they would not have visited otherwise,” says Mr Robinson.
While there is hope for the high street, it will be a struggle for some town centres to recover from the decline.
“You can see spectacular contrasts between the fortunes of towns within the same county with success breeding success in one location and what looks like an irreversible death spiral in another,” he points out.
Mr Robinson and his colleagues provide professional advice to landlords and tenants on retail and other commercial properties, and he urges anyone thinking of setting up shop to consult an expert. “Agents with good local knowledge and strong business connections can point you in the right direction,” he says.
A huge challenge facing start up and expanding retailers is getting bank finance. Ironic then that one class of business reinstating its presence on the high street with gleaming shop windows and eager customer advisers is retail banking.