MISFIT
Portas Reports S
hortly after I married Mrs. Misfit I discovered she had never seen a runner bean. How could it be that this attractive educated woman had never come across this exotic vegetable? Simple. The greengrocer on the High Street where her mother did her daily shopping had been
frightened by a runner bean when a child and refused to stock them. Well that’s my theory but the fact remains that he did not stock them. We are told about a Paradise Lost called the local High Street where smiling shopkeepers satisfied our every want, at the same time enquiring after the health of our families and dispensing sweeties to the children hanging on our arms. Britain was a nation of excellent shopkeepers. Utter twaddle. I remember the High Street before it ended up in the old
peoples’ home where it resides today. The shops had a limited selection, the staff were just as smiling or surly as they are today, and if you wanted anything out of the ordinary you had to get a bus to the Big City. Our infinitely wise government appointed one Mary Portas, a retail expert,
to find out what ails the High Street and prescribe medicine for its revival. Mrs. Portas has for some time advised other people how to run their shops, but has only opened on her own account in August last year, in a House of Fraser store. Her report has come up with 28 proposals, most of which make a lot of sense, such as reducing car parking charges or possibly removing them altogether for short stays. Another idea is to look at business rates,
something I do whenever I inspect my accounts. These are quite exorbitant and based on the idea that we are all making fortunes, which we are not. Councils don’t seem to understand that if they tax retailers for being there and customers for going to them (our local parking charges are astronomical) they will go elsewhere, which will nicely reduce the council’s revenue. Our own council surely hates its citizens, and I am sure it is not the only one so to do. Portas’s next target is landlords, and here I cannot
If you can’t afford to rent a shop you can always stand a market. Mary
wants to make it easier to start up this way. I don’t know much about how to get a stall but our local market is full of immigrant vendors who seem to have navigated the obstacles with only a bare knowledge of English. I don’t know if Mary has ever stood a market. I only did it for an afternoon when I took over the stall of a friend who had to go to a funeral. It is miserable. Four hours trying to keep warm by burning bits of packaging materials in an old oil tin. Our Friday market does increase footfall, but not trade in the adjacent High Street. Portas posits that markets and high streets are good at engendering a
sense of community and many of her ideas involve retailers, landlords, councils working together for the sake of the community. I see long tables, glasses of water, notepads, pens and a lot of talk leading to nothing. That is what community usually means in the end. One thing she forgot is traffic. Our high streets were established on main
roads, for obvious reasons. They are now rivers of traffic and it is difficult to conduct business across a river. Crossing our local high street is not an enterprise entered into casually. Pedestrianisation is no answer to this problem. The cars have to go somewhere.
Our infinitely wise government appointed one Mary Portas, a retail expert, to find out what ails the High Street and prescribe medicine for its revival. Mrs. Portas has for some time advised other people how to run their shops, but has only opened on her own account in August last year, in a House of Fraser store.
but agree with her. The price of an article is defined as what a willing buyer will pay, but this does not seem to apply to rents, which are based on what some mug down the road is paying, possibly with blood. I think I wrote recently that unrealistic rents on unlettable shops are propping up the balance sheets of property companies. If they were shown at a realistic value lots of them would go belly up. The possible answer to this is to tax empty properties, but even I can think of ways to get round this, from installing phantom “tenants” to buying a box of matches, which is naughty but people have been known to do it. She suggests making betting shops a distinct retail category. This is
dangerous territory. Once you start discriminating against people you don’t like, who knows where it will end? I don’t think much of betting shops, but they were made legal years ago. I wonder about putting pound shops beyond the pale, which would have killed M & S in its cradle. What about Charity shops? Why should they be allowed to outbid legitimate businesses? Do we need all those restaurants and take-aways?
14 • FOOTWEAR TODAY • FEBRUARY 2012 I have to confess that Misfit Shoes does not live on the High Street. We
have always gone for secondary positions, and I can think of several other shoe retailers who have done the same. We provide a service and people are happy to come to us for it. I am convinced that provided we do not relocate to the North Pole they will go on doing so. In our business quality, value and service are all that matters. The rest is commentary. Things change. You may not like progress, but it happens. If punters want
to buy fashion they drive to a nice warm dry shopping centre. They buy books, computer supplies, clothes, even food, on the internet. Sad to say they even buy shoes on line. Thank Heaven there are still serious customers who want to see what they are getting and go about in shoes that fit who still come to us old-fashioned retailers. I wonder if it is not time to admit the High Street is a figment of politicians’ imaginings and has been dead for years. No amount of well meaning reports and initiatives will bring it to life.
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