As someone who has covered more shop closures in Inverness than I care to remember, it’s no wonder I like to go hunting for the positives when it comes to the retail sector.
Social media is awash with doom and gloom merchants.
People that will somehow manage to spin an entirely positive event into one of the worst things that has ever happened.
Ask any of Inverness’s busiest Facebook groups about the city centre, and you’ll get the usual suspects lining up to give the Highland capital a kicking.
It isn’t what it used to be. It’s knackered, it’s in decline, it’s already dead.
They’re not entirely wrong, to be fair. Things have changed a lot and it hasn’t all been good.
But c’mon, we need to put it in context.
Internet shopping took an enormous bite out of town and city centres all over the world, forcing them to shift their focus away from retail.
Add in a credit crunch, a recession, a housing crisis and a global pandemic into the mix while you’re at it.
How Inverness stacks up with its rivals
But start running the numbers with other places that have been dealing with those huge pressures and Inverness starts scrubbing up pretty well.
We’ve got a considerably lower percentage of vacant units than Aberdeen, Dundee or Perth. And plenty of non-traditional businesses are thriving in our city centre.
Of course, sometimes you have to remember that tuning out the shouty, angry Facebook men and women is an absolute necessity for survival in the modern world.
That’s easier said than done though. And it can often give you a quick temperature of how local people feel about a certain issue.
Take the St Giles Centre’s closure in Elgin. I’ve detected a major shift in tone when it comes to people talking about it.
Its recent closure has undoubtedly been a hammer blow for the town.
Losing so many businesses – and jobs – in one fell swoop has stirred up a lot of emotions in people.
In the main, those emotions have been sadness and anger.
There’s been the odd sprinkling of optimism from those who believe it’ll be a chance for a fresh start for the town too.
But I haven’t heard many people saying that this is what they wanted all along.
Yet rewind a few months and there was no shortage of people calling it an “embarrassment” and demanding it close its doors.
The Eastgate
It’s made me wonder how people would respond if it was our own shopping centre, the Eastgate, that found itself in this peril.
It too will occasionally take a hammering from people.
That noise has become particularly loud recently with the revelation that its food court is – once again – vacant.
The complaints usually centre around the same things. The space left behind by Debenhams still hasn’t been filled and there are too many units that aren’t even shops.
If you’re being balanced about it though, you can’t ignore that huge department stores are not in a hurry to take up giant spaces in 2025 shopping centres.
And trying to diversify away from a struggling retail sector is something many are having to consider just to keep their heads above water.
The good news is that the Eastgate is free of a lot of the problems that ultimately led to the St Giles Centre’s demise.
But imagine the fallout if Inverness found itself in the same position.
Picture the shuttered units, the eerie silence, memories of big Christmas crowds a thing of the past.
It doesn’t sound great, does it?
People would rightly be devastated.
There’s likely to be a difficult time ahead for every shopping centre like it in Britain.
If we don’t want to lose ours, we better keep using it.
Stuart Findlay lives in Inverness and is a journalist with the Press and Journal.
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