LAW OF THE RETAIL JUNGLE

• BERNARD SALT
  THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE
• FEBRUARY 1, 2020

The suburban home has been at the forefront of social and cultural change in Australia for more than a generation and in the 21st century the home is bigger, the block smaller. Both parents work. Kids have organised playdates instead of spontaneous backyard cricket matches. 

There’s been an equally profound shift in the shops and services that support our way of life in the surrounding streets. It makes sense: people want services that fit in with their busy lives. The high-street shopping strip used to deliver all the necessary accoutrements within walking distance of home, or maybe along a tram route. The retail strip is functionally and I think emotionally connected into the suburban places we Australians call home.

Supermarkets and shopping malls now loom large in most of our lives and, along with online shopping, they are the kings of the retail jungle; the shops of abandoned high street are left fighting for survival.

The pride of this jungle, the once prolific Aussie milk bar, replete with colourful plastic fly-strip plumage, has now all but disappeared. The milk bar changed its name 20 years ago to “convenience store” in a last-ditch attempt to appear more current; sadly, this did nothing to help its survival. Today’s convenience store or mini-mart might be attached to a petrol station, but you’re likely to have to drive to the next suburb to find one. There was a time when the “servo” abounded, perched boldly on the suburban crossroads attached to retail strips. Today, they are scarcer and have transformed into DIY centres ironically called “service centres” replete with supermarket-styled shelving and operated by one or two people. How long do you think it will be before this facility is entirely automated?

The reality is that most suburban shopping strips have been in transition for decades. And the service station site has become an upscale apartment building aimed at downsizing baby-boomers or aspirational Millennials. The ground-floor shopfronts might be leased to a manicurist, a personal trainer, a Pilates studio or a medical imaging group. The high-street butcher shop might have hung on, but only if reinvented as a purveyor of gourmet meats, a place where local foodies might receive cooking tips.

Vacancies in shopping strips occasionally support pop-up shops before “going dark” once again. The brave pop-up either dies a horrible death or it re-emerges in a more glamorous format in a more fashionable location. Nowhere is Darwin’s law of survival of the fittest more evident than in the retail jungle.

In some ways shopping strips are a bit like an elongated petri dish trialling new shops and services that, if successful, then make the transition to a climate-controlled shopping centre. What does seem to be working in the hippest of our nation’s shopping strips are cafes that spill patrons onto the pavement, but there are only so many cafes a community can support.

Change the values and way of life of the average Australian household and it’s hardly surprising that the surrounding services will change too. I know it’s mostly for the better, but there’s part of me that hankers for the simplicity of the milk bar, the butcher shop, the local bank and all the other services that once injected life, energy and community into our suburbs