Clone Town Development
Clone towns are towns in which small shops such as butchers, greengrocers, pet shops and dry cleaners have been driven out by national supermarket retailers, fast food chains, mobile phone shops and global fashion outlets.
There are more chain stores around Stamford. Money being spent in local stores, invest back into Stamford whereas say like Marks and Spencer may have their store manager living in London and they may choose to invest in London.
A home town is a town where there are loads of individual shops but clone town development seems to be taking over the hometowns and making high streets with global and national shops. These are usually shops that everyone has heard of. People like these shops because they are well priced, you can access most things easily and there is a lot of help and quite a lot of space. Whereas individual shops are small and not as easy to access with not as much help to where you want to get to. But home town shops are unique and there are only one or two of that name around the county.
Effects of clone towns
The effects of clone towns are that people’s jobs will get taken up by larger stores that people tend to be attracted to. They may have a bit of competition and then get forced to close due to not many customers and a very low profit.
People who shopped in the high street in the local shops and used the market to shop with may feel pushed away from Stamford because the little shops will be taken over by huge micro supermarkets or chain stores.
These huge stores seem to have a positive and a warm welcome feel to buyers. This is probably because they are a well known brand and are spread throughout the country. One example of this is Tesco’s. These chain stores start off small and then they grow. It seems like they suck all of the money out of individual shops. People feel safe buying from such shops because everyone else across the country does and the shops are handy to access, you don’t have to spend time worrying about parking because there are usually huge car parks there. These huge stores sometimes have other mini shops inside them and a huge roof over them. This protects the buyers from weather whereas you don’t get that when shopping in individual shops.
Changes of the UK retail environment in the future
Back some time ago there weren’t many cars as there is today! Cars were harder to get and took a while to get used to. A lot more people used to use public transport and so they travelled to local towns mainly. Now people can just get in their car and drive wherever. In the future I think that places will be mainly internet run and that nearly everyone will order off the internet. There seems to be no limit on the size of the internet. People will stop going to shops and even supermarkets as they can order from big stores offline.
