By Bobby Kerr
Will parking be €10 an hour so everyone stops at an area 3 miles from town and either walks or gets a shuttle? Or do they even go to the place where town once was? Will all our cars now be electric so there is an eerie quiet on the streets and no diesel fumes? Or have people long given up on the car? Do you need one now that public transport is so good and you live in town?
What’s left of retail is at the major intersections 3 or 4 miles outside our major cities. Here lie the warehouses for the online delivery’s that have tiny viewing rooms at the front if you insist on viewing before buying which very few people do now.
Back on the high street things have changed. Indeed to quote Yeats from Easter 1916 “All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born." Gone are CD shops, Book shops, the travel agents, the bank, the pub, the credit union and the estate agent. A cold wind blows down the high street – you spot a bundle of tumble weed blowing down a side street.
The Garda station is also gone but you do pass a Garda squad car which has a shotgun highly visible mounted up on the dashboard. Inside are two Robocop type heavily armed Templemore graduates. How times have changed....
Some of the Coffee shops are still there, thank God, and guess what – they sell draft beer and bottles of wine. Food of all types is there in abundance, there are new farmer’s market shops which are a collaboration between a new generation farmer and retailers who saw the light. Some of the old electronics retailers and furniture shops that are now in the out of town warehouses are now on the high street “showcasing” their products in tiny shops where you can touch & feel products and buy them on the spot from your mobile wallet (the IPhone 17S).
Are out of town shopping centres ruining our high street?
Cash is no longer king in fact it doesn’t exist.
Supermarkets are also gone now; If you are a supermarket shopper you place your order from your cashless wallet (mobile)and get a weekly delivery from a warehouse over 100 miles away. I am encouraged to see people living where there were once shops. Medical centres, schools, universities restaurants and retail farmers markets are all city centre now.
Wow, it’s a very different high street to the one I remember from those hazy austere days of 2014.
What will happen to our country pubs?
The second series of Bobby Kerr’s Winning Back the High Street roadshows kick off this Saturday in Cork and will be visiting places such as Mullingar, Waterford and Letterkenny in the weeks and months ahead. When Bobby first embarked on his quest to win back the high street, there were just over 27,000 vacant commercial premises in the country. A massive amount of work is being done around the countries by local business owners refusing to give up, but towns and villages still face a huge number of problems. Bobby is determined to fight for the retailers of Ireland. He wants to hear retailers’ experiences – what are the problems causing this, and most importantly, what are the solutions? With this in mind he is taking to the road again with Winning Back the High Street on Saturday 1st November at 11am in The Clarion Hotel in Cork from 11am – 1pm. If you would like to come along, email events@newstalk.com
