How Britain fell in love with online shopping
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Britain is leading the charge in ecommerce – but at the expense of the high street.
By Rosa Silverman
Take a stroll down your local high street and what do you see? Coffee shops and restaurants, probably. Some combination of vape shops, nail bars and barbers perhaps. A smattering of shuttered premises, quite likely. But when it comes to stores selling actual things – clothes, books, hardware, electronics and so on – the numbers have been dwindling for years.
New figures suggesting the British spend a higher proportion of their income online than anyone else in the world may come as no surprise, then. We are splashing 8.8% of our annual earnings online, analysis by fashion retailer Public Desire has found. This compares to the 4.3% spent in the US and France.
The much-trailed death of our high streets has not been caused, after all, by a rejection of consumer capitalism in favour of some non-materialistic ideal. Rather, we have become a country that’s now extremely good at internet s...
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