The Nice People Thread, No.16: A Universe of Niceness.

PasturesNew

One "treat" used to be Bank Holiday Monday markets where I grew up. On Bank Holiday Mondays you'd know of an airfield within 30-50 miles where a disused airfield had a monster market on .... take, say, North Weald off the M11 - and there was a larger one closer to where I lived.

You could go and spend 3-4 hours plodding around and it's where you'd pick up clothes, useful things, all sorts and a nice bit of food from a hot food van. These days markets are just "tat" as £land, Wilko, supermarkets, Primark provide people constantly with all the clothes, household goods, homewares and things they could want....

Markets used to be a discovery of great items for home and personal use. Now we don't need that collection of individual traders to bring us those things as you can get them any day, anywhere ....

While being able to get things you want/need at the drop of a hat is great ... it does leave Bank Holiday Mondays as a bit of a "nothing to do now" day

chris_m

PasturesNew wrote: »

While being able to get things you want/need at the drop of a hat is great ... it does leave Bank Holiday Mondays as a bit of a "nothing to do now" day

Aren't they now a day for painting?

vivatifosi

michaels wrote: »

Except that economies of scale and buying power may end up meaning Amazon is a monopoly with prices and service suffering - strange how the ultimate triumph of capitalism could end up looking like communism.....

I whether eBay will act as a foil to that. Many find running an eBay shop much cheaper than a high street one. So you could end up with a corporate monolith vs a group of small business ironically coalesced around a different corporate monolith.

zagubov wrote: »

Haven't people argued before that the lack of retail competition is what generates the high prices that make us feel as though we're in "rip-off" Britain?
Tesco is far too big, Asda's getting that way, while Sainsburys and Morrisons aren't big enough to compete properly. The Co-op< Aldi, Lidl, Waitrose and Iceland aren't big enough either. The Guardian once had an article about a town which had five supermarkets, three of them being Tescos.

There's a good article in this month's Which? Magazine about the high street, contrasting the 1990s with now:
875 Blockbuster Video stores have gone, 724 British Heart Foundation shops have arrived.
Post Office branches have shrunk in number from 19,953 to 11,600, while Boots branches have risen from 1069 to 2500.
Our Price has disappeared, Carphone Warehouse has arrived.
Marks and Spencer had 286 stores, it now has 1025. Argos has grown too.
Woolworth went Poundland arrived.

ivyleaf

I might be sort of an "honorary Inner Herts NP by proxy" today....DS is in Hemel Hempstead on a training course

Pyxis

ivyleaf wrote: »

I might be sort of an "honorary Inner Herts NP by proxy" today....DS is in Hemel Hempstead on a training course

Nice try, Ivy!

Pyxis

vivatifosi wrote: »

I whether eBay will act as a foil to that. Many find running an eBay shop much cheaper than a high street one. So you could end up with a corporate monolith vs a group of small business ironically coalesced around a different corporate monolith.





There's a good article in this month's Which? Magazine about the high street, contrasting the 1990s with now:
875 Blockbuster Video stores have gone, 724 British Heart Foundation shops have arrived.
Post Office branches have shrunk in number from 19,953 to 11,600, while Boots branches have risen from 1069 to 2500.
Our Price has disappeared, Carphone Warehouse has arrived.
Marks and Spencer had 286 stores, it now has 1025. Argos has grown too.
Woolworth went Poundland arrived.

The Boots statistic surprised me.

The M&S one could be a bit skewed, though........ I would think that their increase in store numbers is down to them opening loads more food halls, for just food, rather than the clothes side, including ones at motorway service stations.
We used to have three M&S clothes/food shops in my town. One (the smallest), closed several years ago, one other, ironically a town centre position, closed quite recently, leaving just the retail park/mall one for clothes as well as food. However, there are two additional just food ones within striking distance of me, plus a brand new one a bit further away.

GDB2222

Pyxis wrote: »

The Boots statistic surprised me.

The M&S one could be a bit skewed, though........ I would think that their increase in store numbers is down to them opening loads more food halls, for just food, rather than the clothes side, including ones at motorway service stations.
We used to have three M&S clothes/food shops in my town. One (the smallest), closed several years ago, one other, ironically a town centre position, closed quite recently, leaving just the retail park/mall one for clothes as well as food. However, there are two additional just food ones within striking distance of me, plus a brand new one a bit further away.

Gets out map of M and S stores. Triangulation complete. Got it! South western Nagorno-Karabakh. What's the weather like there?

Pyxis

GDB2222 wrote: »

Gets out map of M and S stores. Triangulation complete. Got it! South western Nagorno-Karabakh. What's the weather like there?

Pretty good actually!

And very accurate sleuthing! :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:






I had to google Nagorno-Karabakh, just to see where I live!

Fancy there being M&S stores up there in the Caucasus! Who would have thunk it?,:rotfl:

zagubov

Last year I passed a poulterer's and wondered if I should take a photo before it disappears into the mists of history.

Pyxis

zagubov wrote: »

Last year I passed a poulterer's and wondered if I should take a photo before it disappears into the mists of history.

Gosh, yes, you should!


I really regret not taking photos of several buildings over the years, before they were redeveloped, as I just cannot remember what was there before.

Near me there is still a game butcher's and a greengrocer's, believe it or not.

The wet fish shops have all gone, and the hardware shops.