h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

With high street shops losing out to online retailers, especially after customers have eg tried on shoes in a shop, there has been a suggestion that shops might charge for browsing.
Would you pay? How can shops change in order to compete with low online prices?

A cover charge to enter a shop?

It used to be the norm in France, I remember. Certainly in posher shops.

Not. A. Chance.

The problem for shops is that for lots of people, being in a shop is not a pleasurable leisure activity, but a necessary evil. In my experience that's true of women as well as men, despite what the advertisers say.

If I had to pay to enter a shop, I'd do even more of my shopping online.

AGree with KB...

Why try to turn the system updsidey-ways?

It works fine the way it is:
You get to go in a shop for free,
and browse for free and try things out for free,
but then it's really hard to get out again
without spending some money.

~jwf~

There is a problem with people going into shops and taking up employee time asking questions and working out what to buy, then going off and buying online. Dunno what to do about it, though. I doubt this proposal would fly.

TRiG.

I also don't browse because I enjoy it. Charging me for it would just push me away.

I think that's the nub of it. Thinking about charging people to browse is going to do them more harm than good.

What shops should be doing is asking what they can do to attract people, not drag them away. What could they offer that online retailers can't? Make shopping attractive, not even more expensive.

I think likewise the charging would just push people away more, and more onto online shopping.
They could always try, like, you know, putting some shops in the town centre people might actually want to use? A bit of a far-out idea I know, but maybe have some shops selling men's clothes, food, things one might need, and a few hundred less dedicaded handbag shops...

I think on-line stores should at least have to pay business taxes like the real stores, although high street multinationals have shown how to avoid taxes by fiddling with the accounts.

Anyway it is interesting how shopping has become a social occassion, but the next generation is becoming more insular (in terms of community engagement).

The idea discussed in the OP does too little, I think. It's not just shops.
The city I live in (rather, live near by) has a wonderful old city center, an all pedestrian zone with cafés and shops and Indian take-aways and cobbler's shops and a hairdresser or two. Or rather, this is how it used to be. Today the city center mostly consists of: unisex hairdressers (along one 1000 meter stretch of high street with a few adjacent streets, there are at least 7 that I can remember without putting any effort into it), "1-Euro-stores" (no, not second hand stuff, but just cheap junk), and cell phone shops. And unisex hairdresssers. In case I haven't mentioned them yet.
So... I feel less incentive to go into the city center. So... the one and a half original stores that remain from the glorious era of three years ago will suffer even more for me not coming in to support them. So... a browsing fee would only support the stores that you actually go to. What the city center really, really needs is an admission fee even to enter the city center. They should have gates on all the streets and if you want to enter, you have to pay your fee. Say, five Euros on a weekday, seven on the weekend and ten on a holiday.
To make this more attractive, you could use the ticket you receive to get a 5% rebate on your parking fees.
So... pass this idea on to your local governments. They *will* be grateful.

Charging to get into city centres? You mad bro?

Taxes are an established way of getting people to change behaviour, to stop doing the things you want them to stop doing - cigarettes for instance. Bringing in charges for shops/ city centres is a disincentive and will discourage people from going.

For shops to survive the Internet age they have to offer a different experience. On the Internet you can't touch, smell or easily scale products so shops should get their wares out of boxes and let the customer handle them. They should also, wherever possible, try for exclusivity.

Councils have to stop seeing shops as cash cows. Business rates are staggeringly high in some areas, meaning only multinationals and charities who dodge taxes can afford to locate there long term.

Re: Post 12
Another FAIL of Yelbakk's attempts at sarcasm.

is a useful smiley

Or a might have been a clue

Ooops!

Sorry, wrong thread

The pay-to-browse model works fine at the lower end of the scale. I'll happily pay 50p to visit a jumble sale or second-hand book fair.

I can think of only one way it would work at the higher end, and that's to keep the riff raff out of the shop.

Councils pricing shops out of setting up stores in city centres oughta be one issue that is looked at first I'd have thought... otterwise you get Cambridge city centre and nothing but endless soulness tasteless mass-market coffee shops and the inevitable charity shops of course, and handbag shops, you can't have too many handbag or mobile phone shops apparently...

... and unisex hairdressers! (usually employing underpaid, underexperienced, undermotivated and underskilled university students who take this shitty job so they can afford to study, while the same shitty job prevents them from doing any actual studying.)