In the UK when we had a credit-supercharged consumer spraying money around a retailer didn’t have to be particularly good to survive. Now that the UK credit-bubble has bust, I’m afraid it will take a lot of retailers with it.

Theo Paphitis said it right the other day – no-one owes retailers a living.

I can only once or twice remember being taken there when the cheaper Argos or Index had run out of whatever it was my mum was looking for. I was never allowed to get sweets from the pic’n'mix because we could get the same sweets cheaper at corner shops. And as an adult I’ve never shopped there.

Perhaps we could nationalise them and turn them into state-of-the-art youth clubs/polyclinics/GP Health Centres/libraries/community centres/communal recording studio facilities? :p

The problem is that a lot of companies only survived in the good times because they were good times. Many of the impending casualties were doomed to fail years ago.

http://www.lettersfromatory.com

Miller 2.0 Good point. The whole issue for believers in a responsive state is to use these new tools to help shape services that citizens need/want. We can start by taking appropriate services to where they meet online, rather than expecting citizens to come to Government. The Victorians didn’t build town halls in the middle of nowhere after all.

Drew – Take your point though I’m a bit more optimistic than you. When Labour were elected in 1997 there was 0% broadband connectivity in the home. Last time I checked it was sixty odd per cent and three out of four people say they’ve used the Net. That still means that government services should have a multi-channel delivery (apologies for jargon). It also means we need to use the levers to encourage take-up to increase at a faster pace. If we get up to 80 or 90 pecent broadband connectivity, things will really take off.

At the same time though, there’s a need to protect existing services which still receive significant public uptake and are essential to life and the remaining physical infrastructure.

When Theo Paphitis backs out of buying it, you know that something must be up with the business!

Personally, i hope a buyer can still be found to take over the remaining viable stores in the next few weeks, as this may halt further job losses.

At this stage, I expect that any interest will now purely be in the locational value of many of the stores, rather than the actual business itself, though. Hopefully, they won’t all be turned into Sainsbury’s and Tesco Extra stores!