Internet purchasing closes our local shops

Sir, – What shocking figures we’re seeing for the closing of High Street shops and the casting aside of shop assistants on to the scrapheap of unemployment (“New report showing 1,300 retail jobs lost in Tayside and Fife”, The Courier, October 25).

The numbers of those job losses for Angus, Dundee, Perth – and especially Fife – are horrendous.

According to a study by the Scottish Retail Consortium (SRC), from 2011-17, some 1,300 retail jobs have been lost in

Tayside and Fife.

In the last few years 126 shops have closed their doors in Fife, leaving 700 people looking for work.

The knock-on social implications must be immense.

While it is obviously difficult to turn clocks back, the question we must surely ask is: “What can we do to slow down the number of closures?”

Then, hopefully, we might be able to reverse matters to some degree.

The solution is simple in one way and complex in another.

The simple part is that we must initially tax the internet giants, who are siphoning off High Street trade, in a realistic manner, and collect from them a much greater percentage of the enormous taxfree profits that are being passed back to “head offices” in other countries.

That will result in the prices of goods in shops being closer to internet prices.

The more complex part of the operation is to wean people away from choosing items from the internet, only to find them unsatisfactory and having to return them.

That is obviously bothersome and timeconsuming when compared with the alternative of seeing an item in a shop and accepting or rejecting it on the spot.

At the end of the day, matters must be arranged so the cost of items bought from local shops is similar to goods purchased on the internet.

Archibald A Lawrie. 5 Church Wynd, Kingskettle, Fife.