Small town shops are struggling

[davidc4430]

Small town shops are struggling, but some regional Australian cities are fighting back

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-18/retail-in-regional-cities-struggling-fighting-back/10503598

our local town Kadina's CBD has been going through a ginormous upgrade/refit/redesign in the past 2 years, its amazing any shops are still open.

many shops have closed, i'm sure those that havent have been making very low turnover/income.

places like the news agent and chemst you can understand still doing ok business but for all the stores that rely on the casual customer life must be terrible.

the Kadina CBD has and is a place to avoid.

they say things should start to return to some sort of normal around xmas.

however the new parking restrictions in a town this small, crazy!

they going to start fining people for parking too long in a town that relies on tourist trade?

i guess its all to pay the millions spent on the upgrade. yes, our council has put us into incredible debt for making the town 'modern'

oh, but we now are going to have a hungry jacks and a aldi store! whoo hoo!

they let mcdonalds in and now we have mcburger wrappers everywhere. so now we will have even more burger wrappers and drink containers littering the place.

there is a small parking area just up the road from me where i walk foo to daily and almost every day there is mcdonals wrappers and containers left on the ground, within a few feet of the bin!

[zanadoo_56]

Well if your town is getting a Hungry Jacks with any luck you may see less McDonalds wrappers.

In the days when I was more mobile it was still a long time since I'd driven into the local CBD.  The traffic was horrendous, the parking expensive and only for a few hours at the most (despite the long walk from the carpark to the shops and long periods of waiting for the lights to change to cross the road).  The extended parking was far far away.

Small shops came and went so you never knew if the shop you discovered would still be there next visit...or it had moved to the outer fringes of the CBD where the rent was cheaper (and the parking was, well, barely there).  I don't miss it.

[chameleon54]

The article and your opening post raise a number of issues. The biggest problem is the change in peoples buying habits. Decades ago regional retail was dominated by a main street with individualy owned businesses selling all of peoples essentials. This was where the main supermarket, chemist & post office where located.

Along came the American idea of the shopping centres, usually removed from the CBD with anchor supermarket and department style shops, surrounded by smaller specialty retailers, all under one roof. With plenty of parking on cheap outer suburban land, these drew customers away from the traditional main street, making business unviable in town centres.

Landlords of the usually ageing, main street shops fail to accept that their building is no longer a gold mine and want to keep charging exorbitant rents for clapped out old buildings, even though a very large chunk of foot traffic no longer passes. Because the rents are too expensive in main streets, smaller boutique businesses look to online as a more viable business model. This is why many regional centres have dead heart, main streets.

The answer is that landlords of main streets, need to accept the reality that their shops are no longer worth the ridiculous rents they once charged and lower rents to an affordable level for smaller, often tourist based businesses. Once they do this, the boutique businesses can get started and reinvigorate centres as tourist hot spots allowing rents can rise again.

[davidc4430]

wallaroo has gone down the 'build it and they will come' road

we had a foodland store on its own a few streets away from the main street, with just a hair dresser and a fish n chip shop attached.

it was decided there should be a new devolopment, so the bowls club that was on one side of the main street was redeveloped into a shopping mall with the foodland plus 5 or 6 small shops.

that opened about 3 years ago.

so far the only shops being used in the new centre are the post office which moved from where it was (the old building has been vacant ever since)

a dentist office and a snack shop/restraunt and a sports clothing shop.

the others have the occasional 'pop up' shop in them but for most of the time are vacant.

i dont know how the sports clothing shop stays afloat as the prices for name brand sports clothes is rediculous.

and the fast food outlet is only 50 metres from the 2 other fast food shops in the main street!

i doubt any of them do much trade during the week, they get a bit on weekends.

so yeah, its nice to be able to park in the nice big carpark to go shopping but its only ever busy at holiday time.

[marwi_3023]

Surely it would make more sense to rent out a shop and only get back the rates due than to have it sit empty for years in the hope that some peanut with more money than sense will rent it for a profit.
We have a heap of empty shops here.

[davidc4430]

but also you want new different shops, not add a 3rd quick meal outlet or another fishing tackle shop or another op shop.

i bet the 2 fish n chip shops were impressed when a 3rd one opened up.