UKC

No, not a reference to the League of Gentlemen.

I have been down to my local parade of shops, a place I have been familiar with for about 35 years. It just got me thinking about how much it has changed.

There are around a dozen shops, in the 80s it had a butchers, greengrocers, general grocers, off licence, chip shop, post office / newsagents, a bank, a building society, chemist, a hair dressers and probably something else that I have forgotten.

Now there is still a chip shop, but this has been joined by an Indian takeaway, a sandwich shop, an upmarket cafe, an Italian restaurant and a tapas restaurant. There are now several hair dressers, but there are also about three beauticians and one of those barbers where you feel out of place if you are over 30. There is still a chemists, but there is also a physiotherapy clinic and pilates studio. In addition, there is a gift shop and a few financial services businesses.

You will notice that there are more shops now than there were in the 80s, this is because hardly anyone seems to live above the shop these days, as they did then and this upstairs accommodation has changed in to service sector and office uses.

Back then you could probably buy 95% of every thing you needed from these shops and for the many of the pensioners of the time, this is exactly what happened. They would go to the local shops several times a week and buy what they needed, talking to all the shopkeepers and bumping in to other people that they knew, doing the same thing.

I understand the reason for the changes, some good, some bad. I am just interested in other people's experiences. By the time I went away for University in the early 90s, it had changed a little but was much nearer what I described from the 80s. In getting to that London, I was surprised by how dominant restaurants were on the local hight streets, something that seems perfectly normal now.

Admit it, you love that you can now go to the beautician followed by hours of grooming at the barbers to while away the hours.

I'm impressed you don't have a mobile phone or vape shop or numerous charity shops.

Similar experience for me. Obviously the big out of town supermarkets and online have killed a lot off. Hairdressing famously recession and big business proof and still often paid for by cash

 Chinese/Indian/Kebab shops still remain, the only change being that the customers don't physically turn up anymore and use a moped rider to collect and deliver it using an app, 

The other aspect is parking which has often become a cash cow for councils and has not helped the high street

I’m not so much thinking about the high street as small local parades of shops. My local High Street certainly has charity shops and vape shops, but I associate those with high vacancy rates, which isn’t an issue on this parade. I guess it is more about big player sucking up the retail spend and local provision being about services and lifestyle.

There's always a selection of ladies' hairdressers on the high street (appreciate that NickB was talking about parades of local shops) pretty much regardless of how run-down an area has become or how many of the surrounding shops have stopped trading. Even in small places that don't have many other shops anyway, there'll always be two or three hairdressers - as you say, seem to be unaffected by the economy but I'd imagine most of their payments are by card as I've been told it's pretty easy to run up a 3-figure bill.

If most people do have their takeaway delivered (is that a tautology?) I wonder if it would be quicker to physically go there - assuming it's fairly local - and order, pay and actually takeitaway yourself or would most of them just put you at the end of the waiting list of app/phone orders anyway?

Being a mobile service engineer I get round lots of towns in my travels and I'm definatly seeing a big increase of both resteraunt (being generous with the name) and hair / nail places. Seems a bit strange to me, everyone complains that they are skint, can't afford rent / mortgage but enough people can afford to eat out to keep all these food places in buisines. 

There is a reason that there are lots of tattoo/nail bar/Turkish barbers/sun-bed/shops everywhere in run-down towns. They don’t actually need customers, they just need a cash register and someone to operate it.

They make a good front for money laundering (sunbed shops/restaurants) and making use of slave labour (nail bars) allegedly... 

I accompanied a couple of raids with Border Force when working on a local paper. Unrefrigerated meat in cardboard boxes on the floor, six people to a room upstairs, decked out in packing crate furniture and dirty mattresses. Regardless of the whys and wherefores of illegal immigration, this itinerant poverty was so depressing. To spend a decade or so hiding and working in shitty restaurants in places like Bodmin, for a life of no security, no money and no chance of resolving that, only to be ejected in the middle of the night and deported back to wherever you came from - what a way to live!  it seems obvious to us that that would be the case I guess, but I wonder what economic migrants really expect when they make that journey? 

I have no doubt that the people who traffic them show them newspaper cutting from the tabloids all about immigrants being given 20 room mansions and loads of free money. 

Sounds very much like Holmfirth.

A depressing state of affairs, unfortunately country wide. 

Saw some migrants at the end of my road, from the recent bunch that made it across the Channel. A very frightened looking young woman with a very young baby in her arms with about ten border force agents in body armour etc, trying their best to look like a swat team, surrounding her.

She was curled up on the grass verge with her baby, looking terrified. Who knows what drives them to risk theirs and their children's lives crossing the Channel at night in an infatable.

One of the saddest sights I've seen in a long time. 

That’s just the Royal family. 

It does sound horrific and indeed bizarre at times but (this isn’t meant to be flippant at all, but I am tired and can’t currently think of smarter phrasing) I guess that in some cases, anything - even simply EXISTING - is preferable to physical torture or execution. But yes it it beggars belief that in so-called enlightened times like 2019, this still goes on.

They can be told that there are jobs ready and waiting - they often get told that there is somebody in the UK who can give them a job, or that there's lots of jobs available. AFAIK the (now rather misplaced) reputation of the UK being a cushy place for getting benefits is the common perception overseas I think too. Anything I've come across about it gives the impression that the criminals are scumbags who sucker them in with dreams of money. In certain ways it's a dark world.