Political Crossfire Forums

So with the collapse of Jessops & HMV in the space of a couple of days, can anything stop the Amazon/iTunes juggernaut from steamrollering other high street shops into oblivion?

I fear Waterstones may have a bleak future, though I hope I'm wrong (Bookshops allow you to pick them up & leaf through the pages. An important aspect of deciding whether to buy a book imo).

The death of the high street may not be with us just yet, but I can only see things getting worse as shops just can't compete with the lower overheads of web stores. What impact will this have on unemployment in the future?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013 ... NTCMP=SRCH

The High street will survive, it has for 150 years. Here is an excellent documentary series that deals with these changes in a very practical way

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1768544/episodes?season=1

It is unlikely hypermarts are going to build on the High Street. They tend to stake their claim away from the economic hubs of a town and try to woo the customer to their locations

The major problem for all of these companies are the enormous fixed costs caused by rents, which is why they are going into administration just as rents are due. Large companies and small owner-proprietors are proving fairly robust to recession because they do not have high or variable fixed costs caused by rents so do not need to generate such massive margins to survive.

All we are seeing as a very old-fashioned business model finally failing. The high street will change as landlords cannot rent their shops out and are forced to sell, at which point companies can buy their own premises and things with recover.

However everybody has known this business model was doomed for about the last 30 years so you have to wonder why the people running companies such as HMV didn't do anything about it sooner. Although the people running HMV decided that internet shopping was a flash in the pan that wasn't worth getting involved in, so I'm guessing they aren't terribly competent.