I've seen shops in London that don't even bother having any products on display. Just many blokes and a till.

In the uk virtually all thrift stores are run by a well known charity and thus the locals call them charity shops.

Are there no similar stores in the US?

Progress will unavoidably kill more and more physical shops, but this has huge cons: cities are emptier and more dangerous.

In the average European mediterranean city, shops provide lights, vibe, safety.

As people feel less secure, because it's getting dark at 5-6 pm half the year (the time people usually leave work) and shops are closed, they also go downtown less accelerating the death of other businesses. And the only people on the streets are either those returning home, drunks, or immigrants doing god knows what. And this progressive decay accelerates. The only shops left are then bought en masse by foreign entrepeneurs, often working the place with their families 16 hours per day to squeeze pennies.

Any random downtown in Italy bar the most touristic places that have people all year suffers of this, even major centers (100k+ citizens).

Rents do get progressively lower in distressed areas because they are distressed, and higher in high demand ones, but that's not enough when less customers are entering your shops anyway.

Commercial units sit empty instead of lowering rents because of the 'extend and pretend' in lending. The banks can't afford to revalue commercial real estate at the current market rate. It's like the 70s again.

There's no design of anybody, red tape and taxes have always been there, but they are not a problem of many sectors, but commerce in particular in this period of time, and not just in Italy but globally.

It isn't so much extend and pretend, its landlord CANT lower the rent without violating their loan.

If you get government involved, this will just get more expensive. We need to wait it out until the landlord can't pay the loan anyway and is forced to sell the building at a massive loss. Then the new owner will have a new loan with a new price floor and the dance can start over.

Or you pay minimum rent but your landlord gives you some of it back?

Idk, there's probably room for creativity here

Investment real estate has traditionally been a way for individuals and small landlords to build wealth over time. More recently, governments have decided that they want to add tons and tons of regulations to rentals, making it impossible for small landlords to continue to make a profit. Hence, they sell to big landlords who are impossible for tenants to deal with.

I mean isn’t the whole rub the cost of housing is outpacing wages? Goes to show how short our historical perspective really is.

It is not:) There was a fortunate coincidence of factors like economy, demography, immigration from EU countries which enabled it. Now that's all over, it's gone.

If you go out after 7 pm most of the year half the people downtown are immigrants selling drugs, doing petty crime or whistling and annoying women.

One of the only "facts" we know about crime is that it correlates very closely with poverty, which makes sense, since those who are doing well have more motivation to avoid disturbing the status quo.

That's what's going on here. @passive is repeating the word "fact" from the parent comment.

It's not merely a bit controversial, it's heresy

It's quite possible that high levels of immigration of unskilled or otherwise unemployable people is a bad thing for a country that shouldn't be allowed. That is a very different thing than acting like the reason it is a bad idea is because of their culture or race.

That is my problem with the whole thing, all just gets thrown into one bag "immigrants". The women assaulting islamist gets the same label as the homosexual atheist fleeing where they are in charge. (And never mind that the bible contains mostly the same bad passages as the quoran and I never done the numbers, but I assume if we count and plot "muslims killed by non non muslims vs "non muslims killed by muslims" - that number would match the felt reality)

What does "by extension" mean? Culture is voluntary. You can (and should) walk away from a flawed culture. Race is an unsheddable fixed attribute.

Meanwhile, both culture and race see more variation within groups than they do between groups, making discrimination a losing proposition even aside from its inherent immorality.

Btw, the premise underlying this fact is a fallacy. It is the norm for population groups, even meaningfully differing ones, to have "more internal variation" than between groups.

There is more variation in height within sexes than between them, but despite this there is still a very (statistically and culturally) significant difference in average height between men and women.

It's even possible for two distributions to be completely separated by a given variable while still having more internal variance.

To a limited extent as an individual. One can't simply remake the entire world they were born within.

I'm just stating a fact: the presence of dangerous immigrants in downtown Reggio Emilia or Modena make these cities less safe, especially for women.

Immigrants make less than 10% of the population but account for 52% of small and 74% of violent crime, while sexual harassment reaches almost 90%.

I have been assaulted twice, my SO and her friend have been, and anybody we know has a similar story.

They make locals less prone to go shopping, and as shops close it enforces the vicious cycle of people not going downtown and thus more shops closing.

What are some of the other "facts" "we" know about?

I think the commenter has expanded further on what he or she thinks they ARE doing, I reserve judgement - but this phenomenon is apparent.

Yes, but be careful about implying that the dominant causation is poverty -> crime. Crime is the best cause of poverty because it makes doing business impossible and forces every actor to make every aspect of their life more and more inefficient in order to protect what they already have. Places like, say, Singapore are case studies in how a crackdown on law and order is all it takes to make a place go from very poor to extremely wealthy in a generation or so.

It's been allowed to fester because the late 20th century was (so far) the high water mark for societal tolerance of that sort of thing and it hasn't been abused enough since to really see much legal scrutiny.

High-trust Anglo civilization is not compatible with the attitude towards civil authority common in the 19th-century Mezzogiorno. It took literal generations to fix.

Waspy paternalism gave us eugenics, multi-generational welfare and plenty of other great stuff so it's not like the alternative is all that much better.

It's incredible how much of what we consider safety ultimately boils down to totally arbitrary vibes. There are tons of cities in the mediterranean that are way more dangerous than the worst parts of the uk, but because Italy has better PR (and isn't the target of right-wing hysteria), nobody cares.

Are there parts of society where this is different? This whole going concern is vibe-based.

When a lake spontaneously disappears you can see all the trash on the bottom because it's no longer obscured by the water.

When economic prosperity disappears you're left with baseline services that involve people and the government, because all the other activity that was obscuring it is gone.

I mean, Ghirardelli chocolate is nice, and I am fond of Junior Mints & Bit-O-Honey..but you can miss me with most Hershey and/or Mars products.

The biggest cost is labor, but labor money isn't something you need up front, since presumably at that point you have money coming in.

I realize everyone who's watched Breaking Bad thinks it's all about money laundering, but that's not as easy to do anymore, at least where I live, and the nail salons are proliferating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...

Local business owners are taxed to death.

Meanwhile, multinationals with HQs in tax havens roll in and set up national branches. The local branches pay their HQs for imaginary "services" and "rights", allowing them to operate practically tax-free in the country.

To be specific, Amazon killed small goods shops in city centers.

The only businesses still open are services (food/restaurants, health, etc). Because those need you to actually bring your own body near the bodies of others.

And of course let's not forget COVID, which was a major factor in destroying small business of any kind.

And the ones left aren’t paying taxes, or wages.

It's also a vicious circle : Because there is less and less physical shop selling specific goods, you have to turn to the internet, which mean local businesses get less traffic and die off. If you have any slightly niche hobby and do not live in a major metropolis, you are SoL. As an example, I would have to go 200km away to buy raw leather and leatherwork tools despite living in one of the biggest city in my country.

Possible solutions to this include 1. More stores introduce a paid membership. This is not a bad idea, a store pays for the cost of the physical location with the membership fee and has similar prices to online stores, and they have an incentive to maintain product quality, Costco is very successful with this model, but I'd be worried that that the model is begging for enshitiffication, you could really cash out on the store's reputation by lowering the product quality and increasing the costs and relying on the friction of the existing membership to keep customers for a fair while. 2. Stores focus on being an enjoyable experience, and hope that if you're spending enough time there, you're going to want to buy something. This is what Barnes and Nobles is doing, and most surviving malls. 3. Some sort of policy fix. I'd be in favor of an online shopping "tariff" designed to bring online prices in line with what it costs to run physical locations, collected by the feds and redistributed to localities. Has the minor downside that everyone but me would hate it, and it would be so monstrously unpopular that it could never happen. If we could figure out a way around that, though, it could be quite good.

There are still goods that are primarily bought in person, hazardous and large where shipping is prohibitive.

You expect retail outlets for that? 30 years ago when I was making my own shoes in London and wanted to buy hide I had to trail around grimy industrial areas to visit a wholesale warehouse and persuade them to do retail for a moment.

Industrial businesses were less rigid about avoiding retail sales than today but it was still way more hassle and generally "the dark ages" comparatively.

Periodically I watch YouTube videos made by a historian of clothing. She makes a lot of clothing for research and display, and she had an episode on where to purchase linen and what to look for to make sure you don't get a sub-par product. When I was growing up you just wouldn't have been able do something like that unless you were living somewhere like Paris or Milan.

I'm a Frenchman but I hold no particular dumb grudge against the English, I actually like them, their style, their music, what I perceived was their refinement as much as their capacity to be hilarious, quick with the banter, overall good lads

so a few years ago, I booked a trip to London, then a train to Northampton cause I wanted to see the city where all the good shoe manufacturers are based (I own a pair of Crockett and Jones and enjoy other brands like Cheaney, Trickers, etc).

what a BRUTAL wake up call, what was on paper a thriving manufacturing town with rich history turned out to be a completely derelict place, with boarded windows in the main streets, beggars, dollar shops, litter absolutely everywhere and the signs that the golden age of the town is LONG gone. I don't know what happened there, recession, Brexit, I really don't know but I ended up taking the train back to London earlier than anticipated, completely shocked by what I saw

The manufacturing employees, such as there are, drive everywhere, often live far from town, shop onlin or at out-of-town megastores.

Good manufacturing jobs were gutted and sent overseas with no thought or care what the impact on communities would be. In some places families are now on the third generation on benefits because there simply aren't any jobs and the ones that are available require skills that people don't have because they aren't taught them in school due to the obsession with the Victorian education model and the shortage of skilled teachers and training opportunities for young people.

At this point nothing except for a total economic rebuild will save the UK high street and there is zero political will to do that because the current broken system makes certain people money.

Also for Frenchman to say re les Anglais "what I perceived was their refinement"... there's a joke that the only people who think the English are refined are Americans (as we are a savage people).

it's the drunken brutes, the burping, clanic, air max 95-wearing savages, but it's also a culture where entire musical genres emerge, the country of Richard "Aphex Twin" James and Boards of Canada, the appreciation for gardens, the relentless success of great authors and directors

slightly different mix and I don't want to mistake one from another (total faux pas) but for me as an outsider, there's less of a difference

- it's extremely diverse, in a way that no other big metropolitan cities I've visited really are (and way more varied and diverse than Paris). You feel that variety crossing a street, where you go from "oh what a nice place with great heritage buildings and all" to "oh I should keep my eyes open, sketchiness has increased dramatically in the past second"

- London during the day and London at night are basically two different ecosystems, love it during the day, not for me at night (too rowdy / wild)

And it’s true. Northampton is doing pretty great compared to a majority of the U.K.

That same bent of evil people came to my town to peddle some "looks good from my ivory tower" type municipal trash policy that incentivize all the wrong things. They cited an adjacent town that adopted their stuff and is renown locally for its filth as a "success story". The public's reaction was literally "hahahaha, oh wait you're serious, hahahahahahahahahah". It was glorious. The city council is not likely to adopt it at this point.

As a Brit that’s moved to Australia let me say the kebab shops here are a revelation. The meat is nicely cooked, generally identifiable, and not swimming in grease. The bread is usually more like real Greek gyros bread, the salad fresh…

My memories of Kebabs in the UK is of very dubious slices of something coming off the elephant-leg at the back of the store, nothing you would ever consider when sober.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_pastor

What, the elephant leg? In the UK it's mostly Doner - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doner_kebab

And doner kebabs on sale in kebab shops in the UK are of very dubious origin. There have been a variety of scandals over the years about the origins of the meat.

About 20 years ago I read an article in the metro newspaper about the origins of the meat, a study having been done, which found that most kebab meat in the UK was not what it said it was. A significant proportion contained a mix of lamb, beef, pork and unknown meats. And at that time most of the allegedly 'halal' doners on the market contained pork.

Recently one of the UK's biggest suppliers of kebab meat was fined for selling doner meat that advertised 87% lamb, but was found to be using large quantities of fat and skin, with meat making up between 10 and 50% depending on which source you read. The 'meat' itself, where it was even from sheep was largely neck trim and mutton trim, and they were using goat as well without labelling it - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy736xme2vvo

Maybe you found some good places in east London that were actually making their shawarma on-site. But the standard of a generic 'kebab' in the UK has always been known to be awful.

If you want quality Turkish kebabs which are nicely cooked, generally identifiable and not swimming in grease you go to a Turkish grill restaurant.

I don't know how long you've been away but they're everywhere here now with not an elephant leg in sight. They'll even serve you a nice salad and Bulgar wheat.

It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK if that's what you are looking for.

Yes, you can get good Turkish food in a lot of places, and good Turkish food is delicious.

But the post I was responding to called out kebabs shops in particular as excellent and I wouldn’t want people thinking they can get ‘good’ food in the average kebab place.

Don’t get me wrong, it hits the spot after a skinful…

> It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK if that's what you are looking for.

Just as well I said nothing of the sort then eh?

I think you did.

I think you've presented criminal behaviour as if it's not an aberration.

You've ignored that there are good kebab shops and bad. That good high street kebab shops are common and sell more than just low quality donnas, including shish with fresh salad.

I never want to eat a donna kebab, so I don't order it.

Cool.

I'll be waiting here for you to quote and link exactly where I did this -

"It's disingenuous to pretend that you can't get decent food in the UK if that's what you are looking for"

And until then ignoring anything else you have to say.

Modern döner-kebab meat is rarely the quality shaowarma of a century ago. It is highly processed and basically a big hot dog.

> Kebab shops elsewhere in Europe are often associated with shady dealings.

No they are not, but there's a lot of racist propaganda that says they are!

[0] https://yle.fi/a/74-20191372

> "All types of misconduct are clearly more common in foreign-owned companies,"

Spare me, anywhere with bankers hanging out is going to be an endless sea of far more serious crime.

None of this has anything to do with food quality anyway, which was my point.

> anywhere with bankers hanging out is going to be an endless sea of far more serious crime.

In Finland? Examples?

So you get to enjoy the cuktural enrichment you jihadist advocate for.

Parking is a massive blight on our cities (and suburbs and rural areas)

it never cease to baffle me to see the progressive cosmopolitan types being utterly detached from the reality they live in.

Yet this is no utopia.

It takes 20 mins to get to the area with the shops on foot (3 or 4 minutes driving - and these are small shops, not even big ones). Like what do you actually want it to have? A supermarket on every street corner? And a doctor's and a dentist and a cafe and a school and a cinema and a sports center and a museum and a library, on every corner? You can't have that density of things people want all within 5 minutes walking.

What you have is a 5 minute walk to the bus stop where you wait for 5 to 10 minutes for the bus to come, then you sit on the bus for 10-30 minutes while it slowly slowly slowly goes some indirect route and then you get out and walk 5 to 10 minutes at the other end. Then repeat the return journey carrying 15kg of groceries back home. Eventually, 2 hours later, you get back home.

Or just drive for 10 minutes to the shops and drive back. Which is what everyone does because people can't spend that sort of time buying food for the next few days or going to the doctors or getting the kids from school or whatever.

The tube is great but it's very very very limited in where it goes apart from the very center if London. Once you are outside zone 1 the gaps between stations and the "spokes" becomes considerable.

One popular way of talking about building for people is the concept of a "fifteen-minute city": neighborhoods where you can get to your daily needs in that much time by walking or biking. This does not require super-towers or any unusual level of density. My own neighborhood, about ten years older than yours, comes very close, and while it has some apartment buildings, none are taller than half a dozen stories, and there are just as many people living in townhouses or single-family homes as there are in the apartments.

The main issue is around equity.

15 minute cities work great for high-paid knowledge workers with flexible schedules who can chose how and where they can work (i.e. laptop + wifi). But this is not true for everyone - you cannot expect everyone to find employment within 15 minutes of their home (e.g. healthcare workers, factory workers, maintenance workers, etc etc are unlikely to e.g. find a factory within 15 mins of their house).

Making area support more active-transport (i.e. removing road space and replacing it with pedestrian and cycling space) also has the beneficial side-effect of making it nicer for people and thus more desirable. So property value and rents go up. And again, the high-paid knowledge workers and their families are fine, but the poorer and less well paid are priced out. The lower-income families have to move further out into lower-density areas where there is not enough density of population to support smaller grocery shops, pharmacies, etc so the 15 minute rule stops working and now they need to pay to run a car. And where you do retain roads for the essential transport needs (e.g. grocery deliveries, emergency services, garbage collection etc) you end up with the lower-income families living there since they are less desirable and cheaper and it is those who suffer from that the most (pollution, noise, safety etc)

If you remove roads of block access or removing parking etc to promote active-transport you also disproportionately impact those with accessibility problems. Not just "disabled people in wheelchairs" but also people who are not officially disabled but would benefit from driving, e.g. pregnant people, or elderly people who are fine but cannot walk distances regularly etc. 15 minute cities punish people who cannot easily walk or cycle unaided.

Basically the "15 Minute City" idea is only for rich white-collar knowledge workers. It forces lower-income families and workers out of a neighborhood. I am undecided on if this is "working as intended" or not.

Right now I live in a residencial bmneighborhood, not a city center and I have in a 5 min walking distance general, groceries , 2 pharmacies, veterinary, vegetables, butcher, fast food (roasted chicken, burgers, kebab), stationery shop, physiotherapist, 2 small chinese "sell anything" shops (basically aliexpress at your door), a swimming pool + multisport area (soccer, paddle, basketball + others), several hairdresser and nail/beauty shop, a shop selling hicking goods, one selling mattresses, a car bodywork shop, a general mechanic car shop, a gambling joint, primary and secondary school and 2 english schools, some place with activities for older people, a park to walk the dogs and several playgrounds.

A 10min longer walk distance and I have 4 other groceries supermarkets, lots of other smaller shops/specialties. The closest cinema is a 10min ride in a bus or bicycle, city center ~20min. Closest airport is a 15min car ride.

I ride my bicycles 10 minutes and I am in the woods in a natural park where I can only hear birds.

It doesn't seem that hard to replicate.

The US might be terminally carbrained but if you design infrastructure for walkability it is fantastic, much more convenient (parking is awful, carparks are awful), and cheaper.

The rub is nyc can’t even do that anymore. How many subway lines came up before 1940 and how many after? What has population growth been like since 1940? All bad on all counts.

We can articulate the solution but we can’t deliver it. Unless you already have this lifestyle you won’t get it. You have to move to where it already is. You can’t expect it to be built for yourself.

In general, it seems as if Oxford City Center is just too big: it can't sustain all of it, and people gravitate towards the nicer part, which is the Westgate.

In small towns maybe less because most people going shopping aren't from the town itsef but its surroundings so if they need to bring a car in the first place, they'd rather go where they can park it. And this is somehow a failure on how most european cities have tackled mobility itself. A lot of urban areas have been equipped with more or less secure bike paths, but they too often become impractical or plain dangerous outside in the larger area outside of the cities.

If you can’t put a picnic table on it, it’s a place where movement must be prioritized over recreation.

But we did remove traffic from half of Oxford Street last week.

…we were the only customer there. There is no way in hell there isn’t something dodgy afoot. Would be surprised if they have 50 bucks of legitimate revenue a day

If I go to my local high streets I either cannot park at all (all residents only permits or disabled or taxis only or bus stops etc) or I have to pay eye watering fees - e.g. £1 or 2 per 15 minutes. Council parking wardens will be out prowling looking for infractions and giving you a £80 fine without any grace period.

...Or I just go to a shopping center like Brent Cross and park for free with zero hassle.

Yes I can walk or take the bus to the high street, but that will turn a quick 20 minute errands I to a 100-120 minute roundtrip, with the discomfort of doing it with shopping bags on the return journey.

For what it is worth, I don't feel like crime or drugs are a concern, at least not in my part of London.

I will say, that sounds expensive for parking, but completely not out of line with what I would expect to pay for premium (location) parking, though I'm used to VHCOL parking rates and maybe you don't live in that big of a city.

£1.85 each ride. So £3.70 round-trip.

Or just drive directly and quickly for pennies of electricity and free parking in a shopping center.

Parking in premium areas can certainly be £5 an hour - but that really will be for premium areas with few spots and high demand, although that's a common situation in historic town centres. I wouldn't be mad enough to try and park in London but I'd expect parking there to be through the roof. The places I usually park for shopping etc (outside London but still SE) are more like £1 an hour in town centres, or free when the car park belongs to a shop or is in a less on-demand area.

Or just go to a supermarket or shopping center where parking is free and easy

I can catch a bus but I have to walk to it, it comes at most twice an hour (usually hourly) and it a very circuitous route so it take ages.

Or I can drive 15 minutes from my door but it's expensive to park. So I generally head in the other direction to an out of soulless town shopping centre.

It would be luxury to have something like the Tube arriving every 2 minutes. I love it when I'm in London.

There's also the fact that property developers, commercial landlords, and institutional lenders frequently favor corporate tenants over independent operators. Rising property values and high commercial rents also price out local, independent owners.

However, there have been some exceptions under the New Urbanism banner where you see localized revivals. Some cities (like Jersey City) cap chain occupancy of retail space to 30%. Portland and Austin use zoning rules to make commercial real estate unattractive to chains. Commercial community land trusts can also be used to freeze rent and make space more affordable for local businesses. I doubt there's a one-size-fits-all approach.

I live in a little community outside Boulder, and we have a nice little main street area, only a few blocks, which is a good size for our community. There's a few restaurants, a cafe, a community space, some boutiques, all of which encourage foot traffic and liveliness. But recently, a little book shop devoted to kids books was forced out due to increased rent demands, and an architecture firm moved in. What was previously drawing maybe 100+ people a day to the main street now attracts 5 employees who work in a closed office. Not the end of the world for the main street, but if a few more shops make a similar decision it will be completely dead.

A race to the bottom, but I wouldn’t blame Amazon. Large multinational chains were hollowing out high streets and making them less pleasant before online shopping.

As another comment said, councils and government should treat high streets more like public commons, prioritising independent businesses and making places distinctive.

What frustrates me is that even prosperous areas with new developments rarely make space for small businesses. Instead, we get “private equity” chain.

Ugh, one I saw recently was Bristol University’s new campus by Temple Meads. The wall between the campus and station could have been lined with small, affordable units for independent and student-run businesses. Would love to browse a few interesting shops or grab a decent sandwich before catching a late train. 23m for a new entrance but where are the opportunities. (This is based off the media announcements, not walked through there yet)

The US has something similar going on with medical and dental offices for the same reasons.

There are people go out of their way to buy...American candy in the UK?

Utterly perverted.

2022 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61777445

2025 https://www.cityam.com/how-money-laundering-took-over-our-hi...

But the "American Candy Shop" places were/are doing money laundering and/or tax fraud. They can say they sold individual candies for £0.50 (cost: 5p each), the profit goes to a shell company in the Virgin Islands etc, and before the business taxes are due the company "goes bust" and disappears. Then a new one takes its place.

4 years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/04/us-swe...

This year: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/18/dodgy-shops-ha...

All these stores dont exist in my country, you can buy watered down mountain dew, pop tarts for 10€ per box and the local fast food chains are mcdonalds, burger king and subway with an occasional kfc and a metropol city may have a pizza hut.

Sure its all marketing, but if im paying 10€ for a delivery pizza i at least want the box to look like a domino piece.

Most of US sweets ive tried were okayish, my favorite being reeses small cups. Was disappointed by how bad cheeze-its are, they were given away in stores as the sales were so poor and started with a money back promotion and still didnt get sold. Takis seem to have found their way, also taco bell (i know its tex-mex, but still a variety from burgers) opened stores in germany and the netherlands hoping it reaches a broader audience and can get more people attracted as i actually like the food given the price point and being somewhat more healthy than a quarter pounder with cheese.

Softdrinks on the other hand really do taste better. European Gatorade is cat piss compared to US Gatorade. Mountain Dew like i said is only the base version and even this tastes watered down. Hoping for a baja blast rollout in EU with taco bell making a push here. Dr Pepper is really awful in europe compared to american dr pepper but at the end its all about personal preference. Ive seen a lot of americans loving Moser Roth Chocolate from the european Aldi which is their expensive version of good chocolate but still at a discounter price. People that love this would probably die for godiva or leonidas chocolate.

I mean, I know they exist too, but that's orthogonal to wanting to eat any of it...

>Was disappointed by how bad cheeze-its are,

My experience is that Cheez-Its are more often than other chips or crackers, likely to go stale on the shelf-might have something to do with the recipe.

>also taco bell (i know its tex-mex, but still a variety from burgers) opened stores in germany and the netherlands hoping it reaches a broader audience and can get more people attracted as i actually like the food given the price point and being somewhat more healthy than a quarter pounder with cheese.

For many years in RI, Taco Bell was the only mexican place we had. Finding authentic Tex-Mex was worth a trip (as far as North Carolina) when I was in 7th grade. As for it being healthier than a QP...ymmv depending on the menu....

As for drinks...how do you screw up Gatorade & Dr Pepper? The syrup/powder just needs to be reconstituted...is it something in the water?

Also, yes, Moser Roth chocolate at Aldi is a steal, quality-wise.

The fudge recipe on the back is actually really good FYI

Also the containers are a nice pliable rubbery plastic so they're good to repurpose for garage use.

Who's to say how many clients a nail bar had? A box of fake nails is easily dumped in the bin.

The only way I can think to police it, would be for tax inspectors to stand outside and count the customers!

It's just stupid that councils have no problem arguing that say, Clarkson(sorry, stupid example) can't open a pub in a town with no other pub or other employment opportunities, but 17th vape shop on the same street is fair game and free market.

It's not about licences - councils can absolutely decide if a business can or can not operate in any area already, regardless of licence requirements.

Yes. I'm surprised that business licenses aren't already a thing.

I expect a competent government to issue licenses to barbers based off them proving hygiene standards, trained staff with college diplomas in hair-dressing, number of employees, and an extremely limited number of these to be issued based off local need calculated from population by census.

I expect local government to issue similar licenses for all other industries, who should prove their competency, adherence to standards, jobs created, and cater to local needs.

A lot that I see have extremely cheap-looking fixtures and little to no decor, and unlike virtually any other store, they stock what they stock, which is generally the same as every other vape shop, and don't even bother to fill out the entire space if it would hold more merchandise.

I assume some are able to negotiate lower rents in exchange for short term leases while the store is technically still on the market for a long-term lease, similar to a pop up store. A lot that I've seen could be shut down, with all the merchandise and equipment loaded into a UHaul, within a few hours if necessary.

Nail salons are similar. They really should have custom ventilation systems since they're working with paints and solvents and glues and nail drills/lathes, but this seems to not be enforced since they're seen as girly little spas rather than industrial workshops and are often staffed by poor immigrants.

You can buy a vape online, but as a smoker, you don't want to wait a day when you've run out. Also as a smoker, I don't get why they're not regulated like tobacco. They shouldn't be sold alongside (and like) cigs. Seems very low-hanging legislative fruit.

I think you don't know why cigarettes are treated the way they are.

Hint: it's not because they are addictive. After all, caffeine is addictive and both tea and coffee is effectively unregulated.

We all want little cutsey shops and such but how much money for that is actually sitting on the sidelines at any given time ready to pounce? Hardly any at all, if any. Nail shops and other bullshit on the other hand? There’s private equity specialized in selling shares of these schemes.

A small business might be less accurate - figure out a "reasonable rate", and therefore charge less.

You're advocating central planning.

The real problem is that it's very hard to build stuff in the UK. This is a choice that the people have made and the status quo still continue until they choose differently.

Central planning is the status quo. That's essentially what zoning rules are, and why everything is such a mess. You want to open a shop and live above it? No, sorry, not zoned for residential; banned. Operate the shop out of your house instead? Haha, banned. What if your shop really doesn't need very much space at all, so something the size of a closet would do as long as it's in the right location? Nope, minimum unit sizes or similar, prohibited by law. And so on.

If they want to stop doing this that would be great, but if they're not going to stop doing it then having the rules be things like "no chains" instead of "no small units" would certainly be an improvement.

Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default.

On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.

The requirements are nothing but a type of tax whose revenue is allocated to some de facto government program. But taxes on new development are asinine because they inherently get passed on as higher rents for humans and businesses, and the latter then have to pass them on as higher prices -- or can't afford them and go out of business, which is how you get the high street full of vape shops.

That does not seem true. Most (though certainly not all) daycares I see in Europe have buildings that have a layout similar to a school with outdoor areas. A daycare doesn’t need a window front but needs a sandpit.

I feel like the absurdity is the other way.

Consider the two components of a public daycare: Who runs it and who pays for it.

With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.

With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids. Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?

The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves. Whereas if the parent can do higher skilled work then they can still take the job and use the subsidy money to pay for daycare, even if they're not required to use it for that. So the better subsidy is the one in cash.

Here in Norway it's heavily subsidized. I don't know what the cost for the parents if it would've been if it weren't. But in this very high-cost country it costs about €200/month to have a child in daycare/kindergarten (ages 1-5, usually run separated in age groups 1-2 and 3-5). Second child simultaneously is cheaper. Third is cheaper still.

> Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?

I'm pretty sure that would leave us with extremely variable coverage for those who do choose kindergarten.

Because they're subsidizing the rest of the cost. But that's the issue. If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money? Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare. Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.

> I'm pretty sure that would leave us with extremely variable coverage for those who do choose kindergarten.

It would have a similar effect to having an economy that allowed more families to be sustainable on a single income rather than two. Then fewer of them would need daycare and there might be fewer daycares, but that doesn't seem like a great reason to force more kids into daycare, especially when the consequence would plausibly be something like the nearest one to you is 14 km away instead of 10 km.

> Although I am a free-marketeer, I also believe that these are services that should be available at quality to anyone independently of income.

But now you're talking about the price again.

Suppose the actual unsubsidized cost for providing quality service is X. If you provide a daycare subsidy for each child in the amount of X, it costs the government X, and then everyone can afford daycare. If you instead provide a cash subsidy for each child the amount of X, it costs the government X, and still everyone can afford daycare, because paying for it costs X and they received X in cash to use for that or anything else at their choosing.

> How is this perverse? Do we not need people doing low-wage jobs?

It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.

And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.

I know. I used the price as an example to indicate how heavily subsidized it must be.

> If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?

Because the market for daycare will favor the well-off. You're just topping off the income of people who need daycare, then leaving everyone to fend for themselves. That's often OK. I think there are some sectors where it's not. Kindergartens being one. This is, for both of us, of course just opinions.

> Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare.

And if you hand off more cash, you get better daycare. And less cash, worse daycare. I'm totally fine with that logic for TVs and cars, not so much with our children. Even from a purely capitalist perspective: a major force in capitalism is rewarding and thereby incentivizing useful behavior – what behavior of the children are we incentivizing (resp. disincentivizing) by sending them to a good (resp. bad) kindergarten? It's absurd.

> Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.

And now you've taken a person out of the labor force. Possibly forever. Granted, there are some big open questions about the labor force going forward, but looking back decades it's been clear that that's a bad thing in western societies.

> It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.

None of this makes much sense in most cases. In my municipality, kindergarten employees are responsible for roughly 5 small children or 8 big children at any given time. There are no full-time jobs in this country that pay a fifth of a kindergarten employee's salary (yes yes, there are overheads etc).

But yes, I can see the math maybe working out if you have 4 children under the age of six and are working as e.g. a cleaner. Maybe. I think that's a very small segment of society. And you know, I'd much rather still send those kids to kindergarten, have them play with the children of millionaires and children like themselves all day, while the parent retrains for a job they'd rather do.

> And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.

I agree that useful jobs should be well-paying enough that recruiting people into them doesn't require applying extra societal pressure. Of course.

They did, for many years. It was a flagship policy of the Christian Democratic party. Labour and the left didn't like it because it was seen as keeping women dependent and out of the labour force (I think something like 90% of the time, it was the woman who took advantage of the subsidy). The far right didn't like it, because it was very often the wrong kind of woman who chose to stay at home with their 2 year old. So it was steadily reduced until I think it was removed entirely.

It should also be said that a lot of parents who took the stay at home subsidy didn't actually stay at home, but hired a nanny instead of sending their children to kindergarten. That got disapproval even from the traditionalists.

Because having each parent have to go to a privatized daycare utimately costs more, for a worse service than it being a public service. It also reinforces social segregation, where wealthy parents can afford to put their children into the fancy daycare, while poorer ones either don't (which is horrible for the children), or have them in run down, overcrowded day cares.

I live in a tourist town in Norway. There are some nice shops. A nice cafe run by some Italians, a coffee place which started out as a church initiative (then got kicked out from their original locale when it turned out they were much, much better at selling good coffee than evangelizing) which has awesome concerts and an art gallery, to name two of my favorites.

There are also tourist tat shops. Dozens of them. One prominent one at the entrance to the main shop with a blinged-out AI generated moose. Oh, and casinos - I mean bingo places. They just extract money. The owners don't live here, so they don't care. They're parasitic, they might well go broke without the few positive externality shops around them - but they make more money than those decent shops. And landlords set the rent accordingly.

Of course there's one place where they do central planning, where they realize that externalities are crucial in retail and charge rent accordingly, and where there's not a single tourist tat shop. That place is the mall.

I don't see that in Japan, which is very liberal in zoning. Taiwan is less liberal but doesn't pick which shops. Both are wonderful countries with vibrant, dynamic cities. We have friends in both places, and family in the latter, and life is quite pleasant.

So a child living in the middle of nowhere gets to never see their parent because that parent spend 4 hours a day commuting, because building flats in the city isn't allowed. Where is that kid going to daycare now?

(Actually you can do that to, if you just buy it up and let it fall into disrepair, argue it has no value now and tear down everything but the facades. That's how we got the aforementioned mall)

Outside those very limited exceptions, planning in the UK is done on a discretionary basis, and both the discretionary system and the LDOs are overseen by Local Planning Authorities made up of elected local councillors.

There's no central planning authority, and the system is designed to be flexible at the cost of providing less certainty to developers. Mixed use developments are the norm here, and most new residential blocks will have some form of commercial or social space on the ground floor.

The UK can't make stuff because the rent is too high. Fix this and a lot of stuff downstream of it will change.

Which seems to be working pretty well in China.

When Britain was building new towns post WWII it involved a lot of central planning, and seemed to go pretty well.

You state this like it's inherently something to be avoided but you give no reason for believing so

See the Astley (Wigan) Warehouses and SIP car parks for two prime examples.

The only way to make a functional society that doesn't leave people behind, yes ?

I was just looking at the prices for city centre commercial rental in my nearest town. Huge spaces available, it's generally more per month, and I'd be worried about the rates threshold, but at a lower price point we'd be in business.

I think there's something to that. More people using a centre for work would create more opportunities in towns.

Again, I think the challenge the UK has is the gross differential between incomes and the cost of buying or renting property. Unsustainable, and very much part of these morbid symptoms.

The issue with that approach is that it results in numerous vacant spaces, which fail to attract enough foot traffic to be appealing to other businesses.

There was a struggling shopping mall near my home. Many retailers left the premises after one of the big stores shut down. Recently some other big brand occupied the space, in a couple of months besides it there is a Samsung store and an apple store. Now all spaces are busy and they stay busy all week long.

This makes me suspect that we highly optimised for the "2010s" online era without considering the side effects.

The UK economy has faltered and not had a chance to recover since 2008. The more recent improvements really because of a reproachment of Brexit and global concerns around the US are welcome but not necessarily structural improvements in the UK.

It's no coincidence that the businesses that can easily evade tax and usually also sell illegal goods are the ones that dominate the high street.

Zero info on who the government hundreds of millions is going towards to help the problem (let me guess: a bunch of nonprofits who won't solve the problem).

Not even close, unless you own a shop (in which case, in some areas, life can undeniably be exasperating and miserable). The vast majority of high street crimes are shoplifting and an astonishingly large number are attributed to a tiny, tiny number of people.

There are high crime areas in most towns in the UK where you will feel pretty safe, because the crime is simply not directed at you.

When it does spill over into personal violence, it is the aforementioned handful of people with drug problems. It’s worth noting that one incident involving three people is likely to result in a dozen recorded crimes. And a British town of sixty thousand people will have so few of these prolific individuals that they themselves commute to neighbouring towns to steal.

The crime is there, can be absolutely overwhelming and police does absolute f*k all about it (after the robbery they didn't even bothered to shop up, I was told over by phone to collect the evidence myself and bring it to the police because "we are solving these crimes from the office" by the investigating officer. They didn't solve that one).

That sounds like something that would be extremely easy to fix!

For one thing, it’s a revolving cast of a few dozen people at any one time (people do go to prison, get rehabilitated, move on or get moved on). For another, they are often vulnerable or exploited: a lot of shoplifting is done to order, to supply the black market.

The UK does need to take shoplifting more seriously, but it’s important to understand that it is a consequence of both the design of retail (self-checkout and fewer staff) and of the cost of living.

What is unjust, though, is to be the victim of criminals who benefit from knowing exactly what the threshold is to not being removed from society.

Silly fake faux-old-testament solutions like this don't actually work, as is demonstrated by the fact that most crime has fallen faster since they were abandoned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...

It sounds like a very rough place, with very incompetent police.

Add coffee shops and restaurants nearby, help promote casual entertainment venues like mini golf, community theatre, not betting shops, and weekend markets.

Grow from there based on the type of demand that appears, keep business rates low for the area.

They say it can't be done, but when that last shop closes right now there will be no choice.

And one of the reasons is definitely that out of your list, city planners have very different ideas about the first point, free parking. They want the opposite: ideally, no cars in the city at all. So, parking fees have been raising to exorbitant ranges as they want to incentivize people to take public transport instead. Except that people instead turn to internet shopping.

Look at European cities that have implemented this even in part, and tell me it isn't much nicer with fewer cars. Shopkeepers are usually opposed to it before, but see that the improvement in atmosphere attracts more customers than are lost through the lack of parking spaces.

Which European cities would those be? And I'm not interested by the tourist-infested ones.

La Panne / De Panne, Oostende, Knokke-Heist, etc, all have quite vibrant town centres, seasonal events, food markets, playgrounds, free-to-the-public pétanque/boules courts, you name it.

Then in France, Strasbourg has completely pedestrianised the town centre, which is similarly successful, although a little more touristy as you say - nice places attract tourists and shopping, it's unavoidable!

Only yesterday, I drove into London and walked nearly 20k steps to visit the various locations on my itinerary. Not every inch of a space need be a road, but banning cars and insisting everyone walk or use public transport also isn’t the answer. We need roads adjacent to large, pedestrianised areas.

The specific problem with the UK is how London-centric and unreliable our transport infrastructure has become. Not to mention driving can be incredibly fun! Much more so than cycling when it’s pouring with rain, you’re going to a fancy event, or have a large amount to move.

But yeah, UK main streets have a problem.

So a lot of high-earners would now have to pay UK taxes on worldwide income. So they left the country or only stay there mininal amount of days to not be considered resident.

Many high street businesses were working for these people with tons of disposable income.

Also criminal situation was little better when these high-profile people were roaming London streets. No one wanted something happen to them.

This is just nonsense. If out of town retail parks are still flourishing then it's not a lack of consumer demand; it's price and convenience that's not meeting needs.

No, it's that I don't like the council and central government turning a blind eye to obvious crime fronts because they're desperate for the tax. Don't call me a bigot or xenophobe.

I would prefer them to be knocked down for housing frankly, as many town centres are close to useful train stations. The council can then use the council tax

Not sure about how to get out of this pickle. So many modern problems stem from the crash of our prehistory behavioral adaptions against new context brought on by civilization and technology, which now moves faster than we could actually adapt through natural selection.

In many cases you can’t even find out who owns a given property. There’s too many shell companies involved.

They don’t care if shops are occupied, they care about the rated resale value.

Business tax rates are based on property values. There is no chance the property companies will reduce the value of their property portfolio to reduce burden for tenants they don’t care about.

If good shops are available people will use them.

I think we need the government to look at how retail works and what shoppers actually want.

There's not much local shops can do about the long tail but we need to stop penalising them and allowing online retailers to compete on tax avoidance.

So unless your "convicing" is a serious eufimism for fairy drastic emforcement, the plan is doomed.

isn’t that a great lever then?

People don't understand the scams but they smell it. They know how they remember things and they no that everything is getting worse not better.

I dare our governments to try and draft us into another war, literally dare them, even a war to defend our actual land - people have nothing to fight for and will turn their weapons on perceived perpetrators. It's brewing. This slow decline is painfully visible to people.

> People don't understand the scams but they smell it.

This is so so true and well put

Councils trying to extract as money as possible from shoppers via parking companies doesn't help either.

Police don't care enough (or are told to do just enough to keep some of the public happy) and the government likes the income taxes from the "employees" and the council likes the business rates...

It's corrupt as hell

What shops would you suggest could be added? Most people are buying larger items and clothes online or in chain retail park stores.

My small town has multiples of all of these but also many nice cafes/bars/restaurants and a butchers, bakers, a small market and fruit and veg, a couple of diy/hobby shops as well as 3 supermarkets, a library etc. There are even a couple of clothes stores and some pound shop type places.

I can't really see much of a change coming here or how it could be much better. Our 2 nearest city centres have a bit more variety but of course are mainly chain stores. People go out for an experience rather than shopping and this had already started well before covid hit.

EDIT: Interesting they chose Rotherham as an example, of course if they'd chosen Harrogate, Oxford, Durham, Bath etc the story would have been quite a bit different...

Also, right behind where that header photo was taken, is a GOOD example of attempts to regenerate the high street.

But the causes are much longer reaching than anything this points to – it's been in decline in Rotherham since probably the 1970s.

People just don't want to walk around places when they can drive and buy everything in one place.

"They do it because they can", this is the best explanation in so many cases, this not the exception.

More than half of the shops are retail chains with stupidly bright colors that clash with the local architecture. The other half is cheap-looking stores and bad restaurants.

To illustrate my point, I picked a random town center on google maps:

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.5494903,0.0881482,5a,55.8y,2...

This has a costa coffee, a subway, a ladbroke, a betfred, a bright vape shop, a haart real estate agency, a bunch of hair salons, etc.

To be fair, this town has also a number of local shops that look decent. But overall the aesthetics of it is highly depressing to me.

But look at the triovet clinic, this is a local place that wants to look like a national chain.

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.1263512,-0.0100254,125a,75y,...

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.7642697,-0.8857807,77a,75y,7...

Rents are high, parking difficult, the products undifferentiated (carbon copy list of the same 15-20 chain franchises), not unique. After all of that, I'll assume prices are no better and may be worse than online retail.

I'm not sure what the answer is, as retail is not my area of expertise. However I think that if there is a solution it will have something to do with people, community, and offering a specifically local experience. Not one which is purely a chore, and I think it will involve much more than just "convenience".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wn3p7by5F0I

A lot of what he said about the root causes of why UK high streets were dying seems to have been accurate, and this is before the double whammy of the Covid pandemic and the increase in interest rates to tackle inflation (as well as the mini-budget crisis of 2022), plus energy prices for shops and pubs in the UK are really high.

Retail parks are so popular in the UK because being able to visit a couple of stores in the park and do your shopping in one hit, plus the cheap/free parking, and that is ultimately what UK shoppers want - convenience.

If councils want to rescue their high streets, they may have to get more creative when it comes to getting new stores to open, beyond just offering a respite on business rates.

German high-street retail establishments are open a ton more hours every week despite not being allowed to open on most Sundays.