> multinationals

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.

Amazon is a major culprit, but not the only one. Don't forget e.g. fast fashion brands. Or appliances brands. Or even restaurant chains.

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

[delayed]

> Local business owners are taxed to death.

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

It's massive corruption at HMRC. You cannot explain it otherwise.

I don't think it's taxes so much as compliance cost of setting up and running a location. BigCo can hire specialists to figure out "ackshually no this is why my site plan is compliant than you very much" and hire them at cost whereas the local guy has to get kicked in this dick by some hired engineering firm's or law firm's profit margin for the same service aaaand gets a worse service on top because the local business who wants to keep doing business there can't fight for their client like some guy in an office at BigCo can.

There's some truth to this. Compliance costs can be huge, particularly if you're dealing with anything that's toxic or dangerous. I worked at small electronics manufacturer in the 90s that spent an incredible amount of money making sure the area they washed the circuit boards with alcohol was up to code and all the paperwork was filled out properly. We didn't have anybody working there who even knew what the rules were.

I don't really think the issue is taxes. The fact the more and more, the default buying habit is to buy on the internet means there is less and less viable business with a brick and mortar shop where you have to pay rent. The U.K is not an exception. In France, Spain, Portugal, I have seen the same things : Either you are a business that sells services, fast food or anything else that is either hardly movable on the internet, or has a significant advantage being able to buy things right away (vape for example, like tobacco shop, you don't want to wait tomorrow to have your nicotine fix), or you die off.

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.

0 value add retail was always going to evolve to a lower friction experience. Sears roebuck catalog disrupted retail in the 1800s.

Part of the problem is that there's not really a way to ensure brick-and-mortar captures its value-add. It costs a lot of money to rent and staff the space, and there are real benefits to being able to browse in a real space (depending on the store in question, they can offer curation, close examination of the product, the sales staff can sometimes offer valuable suggestions or opinions, you can try on clothes, you can check compatibility of some products directly in the store or get a sense of how they actually look), but nothing but friction or a vague sense of guilt prevents a customer from using the store to choose a product, for free, and then ordering it for cheaper online, which completely screws over the physical location.

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.

Instead of a tariff, shipping cost could be separated from good cost. Further separate the shipper and require competition.

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

The memberships idea suffers from the same problem we have on the internet -- nobody wants to manage a dozen different memberships in order to go shopping. They'll just use Amazon instead.

It's both tbf. Shops generate less revenue than before but business rates are going up. The charity shops have low customer footfall but get a legitimate tax break (and let's just say the rumours that the vape and nail shops aren't the best at tax compliance probably aren't totally unfair...)

Charity shops actually get pretty decent footfall at least in my experience (but maybe that's just where I live). More than that they have a few structural advantages other than tax breaks which means they are able to compete where traditional retail can't - things like low staffing costs (if they use volunteers), no/very low inventory cost, and they are usually able/willing to sign up to lease terms which more commercial enterprises would either struggle to secure, or would be unable to live with (eg almost no security of tenure).

> raw leather and leatherwork tools

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.

This. People forget how much more stuff was niche or industrial/b2b only before ecommerce came along.

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

Agreed. It's a whole lot easier to engage in esoteric hobbies these days, because there just has to be a single warehouse somewhere, maybe even in another country, willing to sell you what you need.

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.

Not if you live in the EU. If I want to buy a 50 cent transistor on Aliexpress I now have to pay 5€ in import fees. If I buy it from Digikey in the US it's 10€ shipping, but at least the shipping stays the same when I buy 100 components at once. You can't get that stuff locally because the EU is a consumer shithole that produces almost nothing of value and does everything to make it even more difficult for people to invent or setup businesses or do anything at all that isn't football or paying taxes.

It’s that way in some places in the US and I’m pretty sure local businesses aren’t taxed to death.