Hacker News
points by Lio 3 days ago | 0 comments
Commercial property on our high streets is owned, in the main, by foreign investment firms that treat it as an asset.

In many cases you can’t find out who the owner is. There’s too many shell companies involved.

These firms don’t care about occupancy, they care about the resale book value.

Business tax rates are based on those property valuations.

There’s no chance the property companies will reduce the value of their portfolio to reduce burden for tenants they don’t care about.

Then you have foreign online retailers like Amazon and Temu able to use complex multinational tax avoidance schemes and fake products to undercut the high street.

How can you compete if Amazon can deliver a knock off from China, that you can’t legally sell, faster than you can stock a real one into the shop, and at half the price?

[–] solarkraft 2 days ago
> These firms don’t care about occupancy, they care about the resale book value.

isn’t that a great lever then?

[–] jeffrallen 3 days ago
> How can you compete

Convince your neighbors that it's better to buy products they know from producers they trust from neighbors they live near.

It's small town and old school, but I don't see any other solution.

[–] PeterStuer 3 days ago
From a systems dynamics point of view this is unstable as defectors still enjoy the benefits of nice enviroments while paying non of the costs (e.g. go window shop and try things on for size, then by the stuff from a low cost dropshipper).

So unless your "convicing" is a serious eufimism for fairy drastic emforcement, the plan is doomed.

[–] jeffrallen 3 days ago
If your neighbor is a defector (a game theoretically optimal name for "an asshole") there's nothing to do but turn the other way and talk to your neighbor over the other fence.

Social exclusion, like putting a kid in timeout.

Maybe they will get the hint, maybe not.

[–] PeterStuer 1 day ago
If that worked, then why are we here?

The preconditions to the type of homogenious high trust environment that is required for this to scale is very fictional at the moment. But I would commend you for trying.

[–] Lio 3 days ago
I agree. Every pound spent locally massively benefits society.

If good shops are available people will use them, if they provide what they're looking for.

I think we need the government to look at how retail works and what shoppers actually want.

There's not much local shops can do about the long tail, they can't stock everything. At the very least need to stop penalising them financially and allowing online retailers to compete on tax avoidance.

My father is old and naive. He was tricked into ordering fake "Yorkshire" tea bags from Temu. Fake tea bags for gods sake. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.

We have no control on the quality coming from these sites. We can't even guarantee items are not made using slavery. Both Temu and Chien executives refused to reveal that in parliamentary investigations.

Stuff like that has to stop, standards needs to be universally applied or the bad will drive out the good.

[–] mmarq 2 days ago
Everybody everywhere treats their property as an asset.

The problem with the British high street is that, in the long run, nobody is going to keep visiting the umpteenth independent café serving acidic coffee at £5 a cup, or the minimarket selling the same cheap tat I could buy on Temu for a third of the price.

You compete with Amazon on quality or selling an experience.