*£200 clothing spend doesn’t include outdoor gear as this comes under hobbies, obviously!
Yes, barely get a Rapha bib short for that sort of money these days!
(tbf I hardly buy any clothing at all but I think you get my point)
Possibly, you're not their target market then.....
isn’t unusual to see people on very modest incomes spending £400 per month on clothes.
Given clothes are so cheap now, eg Primark etc, WTF would you do with them all? I feel bad if I don't get 10 years out of a T-shirt / pair of socks etc. Addmitedly some of my socks are just a collection of holes held together by a few threads.....
Given clothes are so cheap now, eg Primark etc, WTF would you do with them all? I feel bad if I don’t get 10 years out of a T-shirt / pair of socks etc
You know how boxers get more comfy the older they get? You know how you can wear them with holes in them until eventually you have to bin them because the threads that are left have taken to grabbing your bum hair or cheese wiring your tackle? Apparently that is not normal for other people. Who knew? Some people actually buy clothes more than once a year and even buy new stuff for specific occasions. I don't understand it.
Apparently there is also this thing called fashion and it means some people replace perfectly good clothing because it is not fashion. I don't understand that either.
When we re-mortgaged a while ago the financial advisor dude had to go through the affordability calculator. This meant asking us about all of our outgoings. He asked be about spend on clothes and I said about £200*. He put this down monthly, I meant per year. We had a laugh about this then he pointed out that it isn’t unusual to see people on very modest incomes spending £400 per month on clothes.
As a professional scruff I'd probably match your £200 a year. I'm forever being told my "new" t-shirts are 2 or 3 years old and threadbare.
My Wife however will spend £200+ a month on clothes, I didn't really mind, it's her money, but it was more than a bit of a compulsion. A typical day for her is 8 hours in Uniform, then home, shower and pyjamas for the rest of the evening. She always had one of those dodgy charity bags of clothes full at the back of the wardrobe, we gave away a sack of clothes every few weeks to make room for more.
@franksinatra . You understand that for other folk, shops in a high street that’s accessible is something that they need though, right?
I mean aside from not wanting to look like a homeless person (ahem) there are other equally important social reasons why having a lively centre of town with shops and meeting places is a lifeline for some folk
is it not the case that COVID has just accelerated the inevitable?
Yes, frankly for every good, solid business that folds in a recession, there's a dozen or more than were on a one-way road to collapse. In hindsight it can seem like a brush fire, taking out all the dead wood to allow new plants to get the light they need to grow. It doesn't make it any easier for the staff though, so you never want to seem to glib about it. Dixons, Woolworths, MFI, Maplin, Rover etc, you didn't have to spend too long in any of their outlets in their final years to know they were on their way out.
This is slightly different though, it's a whole sector. Here in Cardiff where we've built a huge shopping 'resort' people actually come here for the weekend, spend their days in the huge indoor shopping centres and the nights in the bars, it's a worrying time. It's been busy-ish the last few weeks (lock down over here of course) but nothing like normal pre-xmas traffic.
There's a lot of industries that are surviving at the moment, waiting to see if things return back to normal post-Covid, or the change is permanent.
In any normal year the retail industry would be taking on droves of seasonal workers now, not laying of 235k of them, but that's going to be a small figure if they can't start to roll out a vaccine soon, and very soon as in within the next week or two, because once the usual Jan sales are over, they'll be closing stores and laying off retail workers in their thousands.
. Here in Cardiff where we’ve built a huge shopping ‘resort’ people actually come here for the weekend, spend their days in the huge indoor shopping centres and the nights in the bars, it’s a worrying time.
People used to call those town or city centres, worrying times indeed.
I feel sorry for the workers but the out of town retail can **** off and die as far as I'm concerned. They're a cancer on our urban centres. Wonder how but that billion pound black hole Intu was staring into now is?
Amazingly enough, our local high street has two new shops, one opened today (it sells food, so allowed); the other, a florist, opens tomorrow.
Very brave fitting out a new store in lockdown number 2....
I cannot think of a single good reason why I would want to go into a department store, I can buy quicker, easier and cheaper online. I don’t think I have bought any clothing in physical shop in the past 5 years. (tbf I hardly buy any clothing at all but I think you get my point)
I can think of at least one very good reason for visiting an actual shop, if not a department store; fit. While I can easily get away with buying a lot of stuff online, because I like things loose fitting - I’m no muscle-bound Adonis with an eight-pack, there are some items like jeans where trying a pair on can save a lot of hassle and avoid having to return stuff. I fancied some Uniqlo selvedge Japanese denim jeans, and as I was planning a trip up to London, I went to one of their stores to try some on. Bloody glad I did, my usual 32” waist size wouldn’t get past the tops of my thighs! I tried 34”x34”, and they were perfect in waist and length, which has save a lot of messing around.
I found the same with shorts last summer, I wanted some skate-style cargo shorts, and found some in Route One in Bath that looked right size-wise, but were too small, while I’ve had others which measurement-wise should have been right and were too big.
I bought a Thrasher Skate Magazine hoodie from there as well, usually I buy XL, but they only had a Large, and I was surprised that it fit exactly how I wanted it to.
Shoes and boots are something else that should be tried on if possible.
The fall of top ship was inevitable imho, clothes that were equal in quality to primark but 4 times the price.
The timing of the liquidation is also interesting as the rules on creditors changed as of 1 December. The Good Law Project are watching to see who gets the benefit from Arcadia's fall with a view to crowd-funding legal action I would expect.
Ha ha. My wife showed me a facebook memory last night from 9 years ago, I looked down and had the same t-shirt on as I did in the photo.
As for Phylip green, I have no idea how it is legal to strip a company of it assets, give them to your wife and then rape the company until it collapses while your "wife" makes tens of millions tax free.
I do really feel for the staff who will lose jobs, especially at this time of year.
"As for Phylip green, I have no idea how it is legal to strip a company of it assets, give them to your wife and then rape the company until it collapses while your “wife” makes tens of millions tax free."
This is the big question, the debt that Phil loaded onto it made it a fait accompli. you can't grow a business and keep it healthy and relevant when it's spending all its profit servicing a debt. Hopefully the calls to strip him of his knighthood should force him to pay into the pension fund - and they should take it off him anyway
But look at the amount of space that the arcadia group takes up in the high street as well as the forcing Debenhams, the high streets are going to look very different, lets hope the property owners start to get real about the rent they can charge - also the govt needs to get real about how they fund councils rather than just relying on business rates (but this is the tories we are talking about so no chance of that...) so that new businesses can take up the high st space
As for Phylip green, I have no idea how it is legal to strip a company of it assets, give them to your wife and then rape the company until it collapses while your “wife” makes tens of millions tax free.
Perfectly legal, it's been the standard operating model of Private Equity for the last 20 years, eg Debenhams was screwed over exactly the same by PE. PG's mistake wasn't so much the massive dividend, it was failing to invest for the next 10 years and assuming that doing nothing would keep this stores competetive. Arcadia has been left behind by changing trends, online shopping etc; it's been marching towards obsolescence for some time now, CV-19 has just accelerated it's demise.
Amazingly enough, our local high street has two new shops, one opened today (it sells food, so allowed); the other, a florist, opens tomorrow.
Very brave fitting out a new store in lockdown number 2….
Florist? Brave, very brave..., supply chain anyone?
A few years back "a debenhams" was a massive draw to a town.
So much so that councils would give them free rent because they attracted footfall and meant they could rent the nearby units often part of a purpose built shopping centre.
Without the Debenhams, the house of cards collapses. Theres no one else to rent those massive stores, and councils will never fill them with smaller units..
there are other equally important social reasons why having a lively centre of town with shops and meeting places is a lifeline for some folk
@nickc I get what you're saying but the sooner we move to a society whose social support systems are intrinsic, not reliant on a proxy support network (of people sitting on benches in a dead town centre) the better. Community hubs and libraries are a better solution.
Perfectly legal, it’s been the standard operating model of Private Equity for the last 20 years, eg Debenhams was screwed over exactly the same by PE.
All stems from the abolition of the tax credit by Gordon Brown, made debt financing much more efficient than equity financing - we became like the US which also has a classical tax regime.
Also the fault of the markets for not seeing through the scam, you take a well capitalised business, sell off all it's assets and let them back on expensive long term contracts. Cut all investment to maximise short term cash flow and re-float the company back to the market.
What I don't get is that at the point of re-float no one should buy the shares as the company is holed below the waterline, but each re-float seems to go OK, thus perpetuating the whole process. Debenhams, AA, etc the list is endless and all pretty much the same.
Arcadia is the odd one out as PG didn't sell it on (which would have been the smart move), instead he just ran it into the ground by sticking his head in the sand and refusing to change anything.
Small local shops doing things that big shops cannot do will prosper. Here in Spain the small shops do well as they provide a service, so for e.g.
Butchers - make their own sausages, you choose the meat they mince it, advise on recipes etc. Price above the supermarkets but the quality far exceeds them.
Shops repairing things, alterations, sewing, shoe repairs, dry cleaning egg.
I avoid the chains where poss and just stay loyal to the same butcher, veg shop etc.
there's lots of reasons why small shops might be better off, lower overheads despite not having the economies of scale & the fact they (generally) don't load themselves to the hilt with debt to pay shareholder dividends all helps too! Locally, the town I live which has comparatively few chain stores is doing really well, very few empty shops whereas the nearby city is full of big, empty units (some standing empty for years!) in the "posh" end of town (the less affluent "quirky" end of town populated mainly with indy shops is actually doing ok still).Small local shops doing things that big shops cannot do will prosper.
Really like the idea though of encouraging town/city centres to be busy by providing community/meeting spaces etc rather than just shopping. In the aforementioned big city, one of the (pre-covid) big failed indy department store sites is earmarked for redevelopment including community space, covered market etc - although who knows if/when that will happen now. Would be great though if all these empty Debenhams were turned into similar - places where people could go & meet, small businesses & traders could set up shop cheaply, etc.
A few years back “a debenhams” was a massive draw to a town.
So much so that councils would give them free rent because they attracted footfall and meant they could rent the nearby units often part of a purpose built shopping centre.
Without the Debenhams, the house of cards collapses. Theres no one else to rent those massive stores, and councils will never fill them with smaller units..
Whilst I was reading about Debenhams demise on the BBC they were running a side-story about a firm in the US and Australia who were leasing City / Town Centre stores for peanuts and turning them into 'logistics centres' aka warehouses. To be clear this isn't some sorting centre where consumers can go and collect orders, but actual warehouses offering out-sourced logistics for business.
Crazy to think if that becomes a trend, retailers have been working for years to make their in-store storage smaller and smaller with better logistics to have more retail space and within a few years with more shopping then ever happening in out-of-town places and online, the formally prime city centre spaces are becoming the warehouses and the out-of-town places the shops.
You'd think it would be short-term and if the likes of shopping arcades and high streets become obsolete they'd demolish and hand over for residential, but the same trend is reducing demand for that too.
I know "we" as in STW have debated the end of the City as remote working and online shopping become more and more prevalent, but post-Covid is going to be an interesting time. Obvs there will be a few months of ecomomic shock and a longer period of low investment, but will we revert back to the way things were, or will we really spread out more evenly around the country?
Community hubs and libraries are a better solution.
It's a puzzling world where libraries are places that people go to fulfil their social needs, childcare, IT problems, but not to actually read a book.
It’s a puzzling world where libraries are places that people go to fulfil their social needs, childcare, IT problems, but not to actually read a book.
Not everyone would agree I know, but they're great these days, and surprisingly popular now.
Of course if you wanted somewhere (very) quiet to sit and read, they're not so good anymore.
