And does it work for us?
I want to understand better all the economic bits that go into making the British High Street. And as I live in Guildford, I'll use the local town centre as my research subject. I hope that by thinking and asking questions about how things are working now, it might be possible to identify some things worth doing better.
I also just want to understand it better - it seems we take for granted that it has to be this way. Like much of the world, we don't think too hard about how it works in case that leaves us with some hard questions. It seems so simple but once you start looking you find that there are complex, unclear and sometimes counter-intuitive things going on under the surface.
So, for example if I want baked beans for tea, I walk in to town, go to Sainsbury's and I pick up a tin baked beans from the shelf, take it to the check-out, pay for it, take it home and eat the beans. But how does it get there and why is it so cheap? Why are there so many kinds of baked beans, is price the only indicator of quality? I assume that Sainsbury's find it profitable to operate in the middle of the High Street, but is it? And how would we know if it weren't.
Also, what's going to happen with Brexit? How are all of these places affected by Amazon and other online retailers, including, for the larger ones, their own online divisions. Why are there so few independent shops? Is this true or am I brand-blinded by the biggest chains? And why are there so many empty unused shops? Is this OK? Is it normal? Is it getting worse and how bad can it get? How much spending goes on here and how does that break down? What do people actually buy there?
I should disclose some obvious biases: I don't generally think consumer capitalism serves us well as people - I buy the idea that it's a kind of unconscious operating system that we wouldn't choose to use if we looked more closely at all the consequences. I'm pretty appalled by empty shops that have been empty for more than a year. I'd like there to be more of a variety of experiences in our town, not just opportunities to spend money in exchange for goods and services.
I wonder how much you can find out from publicly available data and how much will be hard to know because it's all commercially sensitive. And I'm interested in seeing what other people have done in other towns to understand their own contexts, do leave me pointers if you can.
