Lazy, apathetic high-street shops are to blame for their own downfall

With stock reduced to a bare minimum and a ‘can’t do’ attitude, Britain’s retail sector seems ready to fail

which tends to be forgotten in our national grief. Let me offer in evidence three recent instances from my own frontline struggle to save retail shopping as we once knew it.

First there was the Battle of the Venetian Blind. One of our aged wooden blinds had finally snapped beyond repair. I consulted with the department stores and the home outlets that have traditionally supplied such things and discovered that any blind that was not a standard size would have to be custom made at considerable cost and with weeks of waiting time for delivery.

So I opened the laptop, typed “wooden venetian blinds” into the search engine and within minutes found a number of suppliers offering an almost limitless range of sizes and colours – all available for immediate delivery and far cheaper than the established stores. Our new blind arrived at the door three days later.

Then there was the Skirmish of the Garden Cushions. The warm weather had finally arrived and with it came the inevitable discovery: the dark green cushions on our garden chairs which had been serviceable last summer were now flat, mouldy and unappetising. We got in the car and drove to the garden centre where we had always found replacements in the past. A distracted sales assistant waved vaguely in the direction of the rear of the premises and muttered, “All we’ve got is back there.” Needless to say, “all they had” did not include anything of use to us.

Whereupon, we tried the nearest branch (three miles away) of B&Q, whose garden furniture department would surely, we thought, offer a range of these commonplace things which needed replacement so regularly. “No,” said the sales assistant, “we don’t keep those in stock.” We would have to go on to their website to order them but – wait for it – because they were below the minimum price to qualify for home delivery, we would then have to make another trip to the store to collect them ourselves. So we walked out empty-handed and when we got home, I typed “garden chair cushions” into the Amazon search box and within five minutes found exactly the size and style – in a vast array of colours – to fit our chairs. They arrived at the door in two days.

Finally, there was the Rescue of the Upholstered Footstool. I discovered a small tear in the needlework cover of the church kneeler which we use as a footrest. What it needed was the kind of repair tape which was once commonly available in hardware shops and the haberdashery departments of old fashioned department stores – both of which are now extinct. So I typed “upholstery repair tape” into my search engine and… well, you know the rest.

It must be time to utter the uncharitable question: how much is the retail sector to blame for its own collapse? Or, to put it another way, why are shops that are supposedly fighting for their lives doing so little to attract and hold customers? The apathy and defeatism of many retailers seems to border on clinical depression. Human employees who might offer advice and help are vanishing, manned tills are replaced by infuriating automated checkouts, and stock is being reduced to a bare minimum.

Obviously all of this is designed to reduce costs, but what it also reduces are the reasons why anybody in his

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion right mind would choose to shop in a retail outlet.

The attitude that I encounter in British shops now reminds me of the sullen unhelpfulness of the Seventies when a general sense of national decline merged with the old post-war idea of the customer as supplicant: shopkeepers just shrugged indifferently at any request they were not inclined to fulfil.

I remember a north London greengrocer back in the day who would make an extravagant display of incredulity if a customer asked for anything as exotic as a courgette. “You can’t sell them things round ’ere,” he would snort. Then came the opening of a wonderful new Cypriot-owned greengrocery a few hundred yards away, selling every conceivable species of Mediterranean vegetable and herb. There was a queue at the door of its premises every Saturday morning and, within a year, the old nobody-wantsthem-things merchants had shut down.

As the Seventies evolved into the Eighties, consumers got more and more choice – and more and more power. So retail got sharper, and more respectful of public demand. It flourished because its attitude changed: it rose to the challenge of consumer taste instead of deriding it.

What is worth noting, too, about the salutary tale of the two greengrocers is that the successful new one was an immigrant-run business.

In my own high street now, the only thriving shops are the family-run outfits operated by industrious migrants: they stay open late into the night seven days a week, selling produce from all over the world. They are clearly determined to do whatever it takes to survive and prosper. There has to be a lesson there.

‘All of this is designed to reduce costs, but it also reduces the reasons why anybody in his right mind would choose to shop in a retail outlet’