Let’s get back to the high street... before it shuts up shop forever

THE man with the van came to a screeching halt outside our driveway, blocking entry and egress. It was the kind of parking you might expect if you were being raided by the police.

I could see him on his phone. Then he had a sandwich. Now the side door was open and he was rummaging around inside. Minutes passed. Finally, package located, he approached the front door and I waited for the sound of the buzzer. It didn’t come.

Delivery drivers, I have observed during those long months of lockdown, largely divide into two types: the zealots who press every buzzer in sight, disturbing as many households as it takes to get their cargo into the building, and the bone idle who fail to press any and tick a box on a card which denotes you were not at home as you stood at the window witnessing their visit to your premises.

Hours after I rescued my cardboard box from behind the storm door there was a piece on the news about Debenhams, the department store which, by the end of this week, is no more.

Misty-eyed staff reflected on their years of service before watching the mechanised roller shutter inch towards the floor – the final curtain on their career in retailing.

I felt profoundly sorry for them. And guilty.

The Glasgow branch, until a few years ago, was a regular Christmas shopping haunt. These days Amazon vouchers do the trick. I used to buy holiday clothes here. Eyewatering luggage charges on airlines put paid to that.

Lockdown has pushed the department store still further out of our daily orbit. Until last March my workplace was five minutes away from the nearest Debenhams and a ten-minute walk from John Lewis. Today it is in a residential street where every second vehicle is a white van stuffed with wares cocooned in too much cardboard.

In my former home town of Aberdeen not a single department store remains. Independents such as Esslemont & Macintosh, where the nouveau oil rich bought their furniture in the 1970s, and Bruce Millers, where a young journalist spent an early pay cheque on a Fender Telecaster guitar, are long gone.

Horror

Now, shockingly, John Lewis’s tenure in the Granite City is over, too. I remember when it opened – its freshness, its superior window displays and its cut-above staff who, you could tell, had been on courses. Barely a week would pass without a purchase from the emporium, with which we became familiar enough to abbreviate to JL. The living room coffee table is JL circa 1998, the standard lamp the same brand and vintage.

I remember, too, the look of horror crossing the faces of vox-pop Aberdonians as a TV reporter informed them John Lewis had left the building. How did it come to this? The department store of the aspirational, never knowingly undersold yet somehow reassuringly pricey, humbled in a city of supposed wealth.

Tempting though it may be to blame Carrie Symonds and her distaste for the John Lewis décor her fiancé inherited from Theresa May in Downing Street, the fact is millions of us must carry the can.

From our sofas, smartphones and tablets in hand, we not only dictate the white van traffic volumes in our neighbourhoods but also redesign our high streets. Book shops are today almost completely absent from them. Record stores, save for the handful of specialist outlets dealing in vinyl, are still further down the road to extinction.

Electrical outlets are maybe a year or two from final things, toy shops perhaps closer than that. Even clothing retailers are on notice. It occurs that, despite a lifetime of trying them on for size and comfort in store, my last two pairs of shoes arrived in a white van.

Now department stores, the high street giants you supposed had all the bases covered, vanish from the city centre scenery.

The irony is online shopping is not even a pleasure. Not really. Three times in recent weeks my partner has sent back cosmetics which do not match her skin tone, despite hours of perseverance with the labyrinthine online skintone matcher.

It turns out it is simpler to present yourself in person at a cosmetics department – in John Lewis, say – and see what you are buying. If you are still unsure, there are humans there to help you.

And there is little joy to be had for this shopper in fussing around with zoom-in functions and product FAQs when the real answers to your questions come from holding the item in your hands, inspecting it, comparing it with the other brands on display and quizzing the assistant who is paid to retail it.

Habits

All of these deliberations happened with the coffee table and the Fender Telecaster which have survived a generation in my household though their retailers are but memories – victims of changes in consumer habits which turn shopping into some online game of lucky dip.

Post-lockdown, I suggest we rediscover the lost art of getting off our behinds and going to the shops while we still can; I suggest we put our game faces on and talk turkey – eyeball to eyeball – with real-life retailers. They should have to work for the sale. We should brook no cluelessness. Keeping the high street alive is too important to be left in the hands of half-wits.

Professional sales teams deserve better than this. Theirs is a dying breed and, ensconced in our online retail experiences, we are not even saying goodbye.