Its afecting everyone in buissness, work has gone quiet in building trade, the depots are empty, cycle shops when you walk in the staff jump on you to sell stuff, and due to cuts, redundancies, job loses due to bankrupt companies ,its going to get worse as peeps cut back as they dont know if theyll have a kjob at the end of the month.
Around here, PC WORLD , 2 x TESCO HOME Stores, Homebase, and Morrisons have all closed realitively new shops all in the last 3 months.
Completely different here, we’re in IT Support and Sales. we’re busier than we have been in years and recruiting. We’ve got clients who are coming back to us after a couple of years of going without because they’re more confident and their sales are up. A recruitment agent I know has says that this year is the first year since 2008 that they’re actually looking for candidates after 5 years of having a few dozen CVs a day in, they’ve got more vacancies than decent candidates.
Your local issues are probably caused by the problems of the retailers you mention rather than any current trends.
Tesco & Morrisons are all suffering at the moment, not because of any external forces, but bad management – they’re at the end of a long boom period for supermarkets – Tesco are deep in the shit for being too aggressive in expansion, over valuing land they owned to borrow for more stores – they’ve had to issues all sorts of profit warning and retract accounts. Morrisons were too conservative and got left behind because they failed to offer and online shopping service or loyalty scheme until very recently. They’ll be back though.
Homebase are in the midst of a national restructure after years of circling the drain and will close 25% of it’s stores by 2019 – the ones that remain will be reorganised to include an Argos click and collect store as Argos own them.
PC World is still restricting after merging with Currys – most out of town places have a PC World and a Currys and they have a huge cross-over of products – that won’t last forever – the PC Worlds are being closed down and their products merged into mini-PC worlds within Currys.