Help for struggling high streets? Sorry, Nicola, but we’re just not buying it...

LONG the reliable Volvo of city centre retail, able to trace its history back to 1778, Debenhams – after months of frantic rescue attempts – was plunged into administration on Tuesday.

If you have its gift cards or vouchers, spend them now. It is unlikely any white knight will gallop up to rescue the chain. Dozens of stores will close all over the country and many of its 25,000 employees will lose their jobs.

It is but the latest high street casualty. The House of Fraser chain collapsed last year and what was left was gobbled up by Sports Direct – now the lighter of the £150million it had imprudently invested in Debenhams.

A decade ago we lost Woolworths, to high sorrow in little towns the length of the land, from Stornoway to Truro. Virgin Records and BHS stores have vanished. HMV, in its death throes since 2013, has been reduced to a whisper.

Faith Shoes, Jane Norman, Past Times, Toys R Us, JJB Sports, Comet, Tie Rack, the Blockbuster video rental chain, Phones 4U, Poundworld, Zavvi – all are but memory.

Even Jenners, that duchess of Edinburgh, is a ghost of itself: its celebrated toy department shut weeks ago. And, on a lowlier scale but even more depressing for the communities they serve, amble around the likes of Kirkcaldy or Penicuik and be struck by all the empty retail units, the plethora of betting outlets and charity shops.

Engravers already etch the Debenhams tombstone. It carried debts of some £720million. It owned scarcely any of its stores and was trapped almost everywhere in long leases and expensive rents.

Many – like its Princes Street operation in the capital, opened with much fanfare in 1981 in the converted interior of the historic Liberal Club – are rambling and disorientating: half your shopping experience is spent trying to find the next escalator.

Menswear languishes in the basement – if you can find it, men’s dress hire is nowhere near it. Like Woolworths, Debenhams failed to adjust and adapt rapidly enough to new shopping trends. It could not establish a ‘unique selling point’ and it became irrelevant to young customers.

Against all common sense it kept expanding, opening new stores. It increasingly discounted, until the very Debenhams brand was devalued and customers just sat tight and waited for the next gasping sale. The killer punch, in the end, seems to have been business rates – up 26.9 per cent since a 2017 revaluation.

That’s an annual bill of some £643,000 for a typical city centre department store. The chain’s ownership – by private equity – has long been contentious and at least one sharp eye has spotted that Debenhams (in its present incarnation) was floated on the stock exchange in 2006 – just months before the iPhone was released.

For nearly two decades, at first in irritation and then with alarm, bricks-and-mortar retail has been increasingly battered by such online vendors as Asos, Brandalley, Costco UK, La Redoute and, of course, Amazon.

Searching

Department stores fast lost a central part of their appeal – the chance to buy many different brands under one roof. Online retailers need only a few distribution hubs, not costly city centre estate. They have far fewer employees, they can discount ruthlessly – and you can do your shopping from your armchair, immediately, and in seconds, without searching for a parking place or struggling onto a bus laden with bulging bags.

So, as early as 2002, ‘Man at C&A’ became ‘Man without a Job’. Only a handful of the big names – John Lewis comes immediately to mind – have a really good online offering of their own. Other survivors (and recent arrivals) have simply been nimbler.

These include fast-fashion retailers such as Asos, Primark and Zara, who are much more appealing to young shoppers and seem easily to beat the likes of Debenhams on price.

But our buying habits this century generally have become far more sophisticated – and, through a decade of austerity, much cannier.

If you are fortunate to live in the sort of affluent urban village with lots of really good little shops – Morningside, in southern Edinburgh, is a splendid example – then you tend to shop daily and buy small quantities of the best quality: a multi-seed baton loaf from the Andante artisan bakery, some aromatic brie from cheesemonger IJ Mellis, rosemary ham from Karina’s deli, Williams Bros craft ale from Margiotta – you get the picture.

A decade ago Tesco was cruising because most of us, in our busy modern lifestyles, did a Sack of Troy big shop once a week, succumbed to loads of buy-one-get-one-free offers and took home far more than we needed.

It was reckoned that a third of all food bought in Britain was simply thrown away. We cannot afford to live like that any more. We largely now do not, and Tesco of late has had a torrid time, especially with new competition.

Although Waitrose’s expansion into Scotland has been slow and cautious – there are still only six stores – the excellent quality of its wares and the courteous, well-trained ‘partners’ (it’s part of the John Lewis moral mission, of course) are a big draw.

Aldi does not stock a vast range of groceries, but everything it sells is excellent (in December 2017, to the jawdropping horror of larger rivals, consumer surveys hailed it for the best fresh free-range Christmas turkey) and, by such little differences as tacitly encouraging you to fill your bags away from the check-out, it has fewer tills, fewer staff and lower prices.

If you live in the Hebrides, Amazon is a matchless blessing for the quick acquisition of books, DVDs and small bits of household kit. But the canny buy costlier items locally and from real shops.

If I purchase a washing machine at Stornoway’s Lighting Electrical store, or a new laptop at the town’s Tech Mobile, they might be a bit dearer – but I am supporting two highly regarded family businesses, keeping neighbours in work, money in the local economy and can be sure of outstanding aftersales service.

And there are fundamental questions of fairness about online traders, not just in their huge business rates advantage but the insultingly low levels of tax paid by such outfits as Amazon.

The Scottish Government, characteristically, late last year chickened out of proposals Nationalists had hailed as an ‘Amazon tax.’ SNP ministers refuse to cut – indeed, they barely acknowledge the issue – an additional rates levy on large businesses and at twice the level set south of the Border.

The results speak for themselves. Five shops in Scotland are closing every week. Last year alone, and in only eight towns and cities, 265 went out of business.

Struggling

‘Rising costs, a sluggish economy, and changing shopping habits,’ lamented Ewan MacDonald-Russell of the Scottish Retail Consortium, ‘are making life incredibly hard for the industry’.

Dean Lockhart, for the Scottish Tories, was blunter still. ‘High streets are clearly struggling and that’s bad for jobs locally and the economy nationally.

‘Yet the SNP Government continues to make life harder for these firms. Nicola Sturgeon should be helping businesses thrive.

‘Instead, she has created a high-tax environment which makes it increasingly difficult for companies to succeed.’

A Scottish Government spokesman mumbled something about establishing a £50million Town Centre Fund for the coming financial year.

‘Do a bit of Debenhams’ rang the beleaguered retailer’s faintly desperate new slogan last year, as the company urged us to ‘reclaim the joy of shopping’.

Few working at its 16 Scottish outlets will be experiencing joy at the moment, only fear over their futures.