Your Life Your Style versus Your Life Your Style

It’s a challenging time for shopkeepers. Retail sales are stagnant while costs are rising rapidly. And worst of all, I'm in competition with myself.
Let me explain. By day I’m Dr Jekyll running my shop Your Life Your Style in the centre of Winchester. As night falls, I become Mr Hyde the online entrepreneur with my website YourLifeYourStyle.co.uk. As Dr Jekyll, I’m a respectable member of the local community, paying rent and taxes that date from the economic boom, and actually serving real local people. As Mr Hyde, I can go like a mercenary wherever the costs are low- on an out-of-town industrial estate or an Enterprise Zone. I can even set up on the Channel Islands and sell my lower priced products free of VAT.
Mr Hyde’s online retail business also benefits from not needing a shop floor to display products or paying staff who stand around waiting for a customer. The work of picking and packing in a warehouse can be spread throughout the day (or would that be night in Mr Hyde’s case?). I say this knowing that online trading has challenges of its own- competition on a scale that a bricks-and-mortar shop never faces. It's a Wild West in which many manufacturers are joining in and selling direct to the public. The consequence is usually lower prices than shops charge, even allowing for shipping and the huge marketing costs involved in getting yourself noticed on the web.

Of course, my online business is run from the back of my Winchester shop so it doesn’t benefit as much as some but even so it’s far more profitable per square foot than the front end. I'm not alone in having a dual personality. There's hardly a shop business around that doesn't also trade online, trying to get a foothold on the new world before the old one crumbles beneath them. 

It sometimes seems inevitable that Mr Hyde will eventually stand alone across much of the retail landscape with Dr Jekyll retaining only a few flagship shops in key locations like London’s Oxford Street or Winchester’s High Street. My only hope for the good doctor and the many customers who still like to shop in person is a major revision of rents and rates to realistic levels. Of course I am writing these words of encouragement during the daytime. In a few hours, when darkness has descended, I fear my hands will once again be stained with shopkeepers' blood.
A version of this article also appeared on Wordpress

Who Do You Trust on the Web?

It seems pornographers have the same problems as any other businesses once they gain a bad reputation. Pretty much everyone is wary of porn websites because of the bad practices of some. The U.S. industry generally, anxious to hold on to the 40 million Americans who view pages with adult content regularly, have made great efforts to ensure their sites are free from scams and malware. So successful have they been that a Web Of Trust blog  tells us that while 'adult entertainment websites' account for 12% of the total number of web pages (1 in 6) a study has found that there are 99 infected mainstream web pages for every one infected adult web page, making the safety ratio 99:1. It seems those of us who avoid adult websites and think we're safe shouldn't be so complacent.
Web Of Trust or WOT is a great way to use the wisdom of crowds as a guide to websites. You can download it as an app for various browsers and better still join WOT and register your own scores and comments on the websites you visit.

Does The Internet Kill Creativity?

Many of the novelists who contributed to The Guardian newspaper's Writing Tips recommended turning off internet access. I can understand why. The constant stream of emails, RSS feeds, Google Alerts, Facebook postings, Tweets and all the rest makes it difficult to concentrate. Of course many will claim they can still write their novels, essays, features, advertising copy or whatever while the world babbles on in the background but I am pretty sure brains work better if they don't have to keep picking up the, er, the... where was I?... oh yes, thread of a thought.
I've resolved to turn off my internet access for a couple of hours a day, starting now. OK, in 10 minutes. Well, maybe half an hour...

No News Is Bad News

My local paper is the best in the country. The Hampshire Chronicle is over 200 years old but still offers news in depth, considered opinion on relevant issues as well as shining light into dark corners of local politics. TV and radio news is shallow and spineless by comparison.

Sadly the internet is threatening the survival of local newspapers in two ways: firstly by diverting advertising from them, secondly by taking news from them and providing it for free. I know it's not necessarily the end of the world if newspapers die out, you can't fight progress, etc etc... except there is no sign that advertising on the internet alone will ever be able to pay for the resources needed to produce local news of the same quality as The Chronicle and other newspapers which have paying readers. As things stand, if local newspapers disappear, so will the online news.

The internet has been around for a tenth of the time of the Hampshire Chronicle and there are still no clear business models for many of its activities. Yet it is wreaking havoc across a range of industries from the music business to retail shops to the newspaper industry .

The web is useful for updated information and for archives but, if we value our local community and democracy, we must keep buying our local paper until we're sure the internet can really sustain something as good.