Britain’s Online Shopping Boom Is a Bust for the High Street
Burslem’s Queen Street, where a third of the shops are boarded up.
Photographer: Lola Paprocka and Pani Paul for Bloomberg Businessweek
The streets of Burslem, a once-prosperous market town in the rolling hills of the English Midlands, are lined with grand Victorian-era edifices built to house tailors, tea shops, butchers, and greengrocers. But about a third of the storefronts are boarded up. Inside a deserted travel agency, a heap of unopened letters clutters the floor. A shuttered video game store showcases titles for the PlayStation 2, a console Sony Corp. stopped making a half-dozen years ago.
The town center has suffered as shoppers have defected to places like the Wolstanton Retail Park 2 miles to the south, where big-box stores such as Walmart Inc.’s Asda sprout from a sea of parking lots. Lately those problems have been compounded by another newcomer, 25 miles farther on: an Amazon.com Inc. distribution center the size of 10 football fields, one of 16 the company has in the U.K. E-commerce accounts for 18 percent of retail sales in the country—almost double the U.S. level and higher than anywhere else in the Western world. “Why would you bother going to a shop when you can get it cheaper online?” Paul Dykes, a 65-year-old roofer, says as he sips a pint of Guinness in the Bulls Head pub in Burslem. “You’ll save on bus fare, too.”