A christmas high street story

Every christmas there’s a ritual I go through. The chest freezer that lives under the stairs is wiped down, checked over and switched on. For a 22 year old freezer it does well at storing the excess of food required to sustain an old fashioned christmas and new year, and the surfeit of turkey curry until January payday.

That christmas ritual came to mind as I was reading Graham Halpin and Tom Hindmarch’s excellent blog for the IPM on the collapse of Arcadia group. It’s a link that fits with my view that the issues on the High Street now are more deep rooted and complex than the Amazon bad, High Street good binaries some writers are indulging themselves in.

I should explain the link. I bought tht chest freezer 22 years ago from the Northern Electric shop that used to be on the ground floor of Eldon Square in Newcastle. I’d moved house, and called in to transfer my electric account to the new property. It was a full service trip into Newcastle; I sorted out my utilities at the relevant offices, popped into my bank to change the address on my account, and even managed to arrange to get the phone at the new place connected by popping into the BT shop, and got out without being sold a handset that I could get cheaper in Argos. And while I was doing all that, I spotted an inexpensive freezer in the electricity board office, and I bought it.

The decline of high street customer service points isn’t just about utilities; banks and insurance companies have greatly reduced their high street footprint too. Graham and Tom’s data about the concentration of retail ownership on the high street, and the reduction in footfall over the last ten years, is fascinating, but it is as much symptomatic as it is causative.

If someone writes about the decline of the High Street without referencing the rise of the call centre and outsourced customer services, they may not be telling you all of the story. I had my own experience of it when I worked for Abbey National in the early noughties; I was expected to show leadership to team members in large branches by directing customers away from the counter and towards the inbranch telephone that connected to a remote call centre. The emphasis on costing, and driving down the cost of, each customer interaction was logical, satisfied the concerns of senior management and investors, and had a clear and obvious impact on surrounding businesses. Our footfall, even if only of people wanting to check the balance of their savings account, meant more people, our customers walking past their windows.

It wasn’t, in retrospect, a new experience, to work in a bank and watch as its management spent all their time trying to reduce the number of people who came into their branches, no maatter how counter-intuitive that seemed.

My first proper job, after a flirtation with local government, was in a high street bank. That’s what we called them, because every high street would have four or five bank branches, sometimes with regional variations that relfected the footprint of the smaller banks that came together in the latter parts of the twentieth century to create the big four. Each branch did its own processing and paperwork — anyone I’ve trained over the last twenty years will have heard my patter about the branch I started work in having 30 staff, four telephone lines and two computers, and the amount of mechanical machinery and physical labour my job as a young clerk involved.

I remember all too well the gloomy warnings that came out from the banking unions about the introduction of automated teller machines (ATMs) that were marketed as customer benefits but which meant, over time, that less cashiers would be needed. Doubtless the same warnings were given when the first online banking offers were developed, in the mid 80s although I don’t remember them.

For the businesses around the bank where I worked we were part of the footfall on that high street. The decline in high street non retail employment is part of the picture if we want to understand quite why our high streets are where they are now.

So on a small scale my christmas story about a small chest freezer in the cupboard under my stairs, and why and where I bought it, is also a small insight into one of the areas where the town centres and high streets of the UK are at risk, right now. If I have a job to do in 2021 it’s to help the people I work with understand that the future of town centres isn’t to seek to step back to a point in time, but to try and identify how we can once more put variety and complexity back into those places.