The "same old jealousy" isn't obvious either.

none so blind as .....

anyway, the usual suspects are best left to it.

So you'll be able to point out where jealousy is revealed.

Problem is when all the retailers have gone you will have to buy online and unseen with new products. Not only that but with reputable high street competition gone there will be more incentive for online traders to cut prices and in doing so cut corners on customer service.

It's understandable that people want things cheaper and cheaper, but as mentioned above, the evidence shows that that ultimately leads to lower quality goods, together with lost jobs – and poorer service.

I suspect I mentioned at the time, but around 10 months ago, I needed some stuff for the garden, and a 'man with a van', who's been doing a lot of work for us, took take me to the nearest B&Q. It was staggering just how few staff there were on really large premises, and if you had a query, they were quite polite, but knew nothing about the subject.

Driving back, he was shaking his head at the lack of service, and observing that in the building trade itself, it's the same. There used to be small places where you go with a problem, and you'd find staff with knowledge and the interest to help you out, possibly even suggesting a solution that you hadn't thought of. All those are gone now, he continued, swallowed up by big companies, with staffing levels and attitudes to service at pretty much that of B&Q.

It's a major reason to use John Lewis when I need household stuff (or anything else I can get there).

Used to love the classical section in Virgin Megastore – and before that, the jazz section in HMC at Piccadilly. Both examples of staff who knew their stuff and could give you all sorts of really interesting suggestions. It really is not the same having some software make recommendations to you.

Retailers on the whole need to think about what their stores actually are. At the moment, most stores on the High Street are simply showrooms for Amazon.

I'm a firm believer that people make purchasing decisions based on emotion. They don't care about features and benefits, they (largely) don't care about practicalities - they just care about how good it looks, how nice it is to use and how they "feel" about it. Yes, there are exceptions, but I don't believe that people make impulsive decisions based on a specs sheet.

That's why, in my experience, Apple Stores are always rammed. In an Apple store, you're not given the 'hard sell'. You are simply invited into the store and allowed to 'play' with the product and learn about the product. That's how you win customers around - not by bombarding them by tech specs and warranties - just by inviting them in to get a sense of what it is like to use, touch and own the product. Who cares if you can buy a better spec laptop for half the price, or get double the warranty next door in John Lewis? It is all about giving buyers that feeling of owning it before they've handed over their cash.

And that's where other retailers are failing. If you are interested in specs and features and benefits, why would you go to a store? That information is very easy to find elsewhere and, in the main, much more trustworthy from the keyword of a ?stranger than it is from the mouth of a salesperson. Retailers need to make their stores fun, enjoyable and emotional places to be - not places to be sold to. Locking everything behind glass and asking disinterested and ill-informed staff to stack boxes as high as possible isn't the way to do that.

There used to be four camera shops in Chester. A Jessops and three others. Jessops bought one of the other three out but then closed the shop when they nearly went bust a few years ago.

The staff in the remaining Jessops shop were generally OK and reasonably knowledgeable and I bought stuff from them in the past but I also buy online and have even bought from Jessops online as occasionally they were actually the cheapest. My on-line purchases tend to be lenses and accessories not cameras.

My first digital camera was bought from the shop Jessops took over and when I bought a DSLR in 2011 that was purchased from one of the other camera shops in Chester which is part of the London Camera Exchange group.

I was expecting to pay through the nose for the camera which hadn't been out that long and was actually pretty scarce in the shops and on-line. I nearly fell over when I asked the price. It was £180 cheaper than anywhere I could find online and cheaper than the price the same shop quoted me on the phone a few days before.

So it doesn't always follow on-line is best for prices and I got to check the camera out properly before I bought it. The shop even threw in 100 free prints.

I would envision street retail becoming more orientated around the manufacturer, as a demo centre. Like the Apple centres, it's a nice place to be, to touch and feel and try stuff out. Apply don't care if you then go home and buy their kit on-line, because you're still buying their stuff. PC World can't do that, but HP can. Porsche and Mercedes are making similar moves in their car dealerships, each with a demo centre where you can try a greater variety of options and test driving, and it doesn't matter to them if you then go buy the car from a dealership or from the internet.
I expect we will start seeing more along those lines, shops aligned to a particular manufacturer, that are more of a demo centre. Whether a Levi's store or Sony or Porsche or whatever.

It is certainly the way things would logically move for the higher end items, I'm not sure it would work for lots of mass market items like shoes and clothes. Supermarkets do some of those lines but I'm not sure I wanna buy my shoes from the same place I buy my bog roll, I may not have that choice however.