More etail

More evidence that etail's taking over from retail in a suggestion that Curry's will eventually move off the High Street.

The interesting thing here is that if the specialist retailers all move this way, what's going to happen to the High Street? Will our town centres once again be full of little local stores and boutiques? Will we have French-style streets with boulangers and decent butchers?

I rather doubt it. It's the supermarkets, not just high rents, that have killed the local food shop; and that's not a trend likely to be stopped.

I suspect instead we'll have high streets that look like down-at-heel shopping centres do now - loads and loads of charity shops, a forsaken Iceland, and a couple of discount furniture stores. Which of course has implications for commercial property.

The difficulty of course is that lots of people use Curry's and similar shops to browse the stock, find out what they need - and then order over the internet. (Of course, they may order from a website that has keener prices.) So actually, although the accounting figures appear to show that you can close the shops, you're potentially losing a competitive advantage for your own web sites if you do so.

Jessops seems to have got one thing right. It's negotiated a number of exclusive deals. You cannot get them anywhere else. So if people pop into Jessops to look at a particular camera, they can order it on or offline, but they still have to buy it from Jessops. That's smart. Perhaps Curry's real problem is that it's for the most part just selling commodities. And that means people do shop on price; and they can go elsewhere.