Relatively big for round here I guess, but certainly not huge!! I remember driving in a taxi from my hotel in Wroclaw city centre out to a factory on the outskirts, passing by massive business parks. We passed by a huge Amazon warehouse on one side of the road. I said to the taxi driver something like 'wow, that's big'. He smiled and pointed to the other side of the road where there were 2 more Amazon units even bigger!! Now they were 'huge'. Along with loads of other massive factories & warehouses.
The two biggest Amazon warehouses in Europe are both in the UK, both around 2,000,000 sq ft and only 12 miles apart (either side of the Thames). The Melton one's about 560,000 sq ft.
Just shows how we buy these days , all too much effort to put the takeaway down , turn off Netflix and go to a shop.
No different to you using this forum, rather than writing a letter to a paper fanzine, Spring. Life moves on, ppl don't want to spend their evenings or Saturdays driving into town, sitting in a traffic jam, finding parking spaces and walking from shop to shop dealing with shop assistants. It's not great seeing empty units in town centres, but the owners will just have to repurpose them for something else. Not many want to spend an hour in a queue waiting to pay a bill at the bank anymore.
Bit of a lazy response imo. You say life moves on as if we're driving it, I disagree, life changes are more or less forced upon us now in the quest for better (ie more profitable) services and for the most part we either keep up or get left behind. I don't recall the public clamouring for online shopping years back, or people demanding that banks stopped having managers or sufficient staff to service customers. Too big a subject to cover on here though.
Every time I get a letter from a bank informing me that they are going to close a branch they tell me it's for my convenience.
Whilst I believe accessible banking hubs in one form or another should still exist, the fact remains that online banking has removed the need for physical and direct banking interactions face to face for the majority of people. I haven’t set foot in a bank for years. Not because they’ve inconveniently closed ones near me down, not because my banking needs have significantly changed, not because I’m lazy and can’t be bothered to go out, but simply because I haven’t needed to. I can do everything on my phone. Other people may still bank in a twentieth century manner - fair enough - but the critical mass of people weren’t using physical banks, hence the reason so many have closed down as banks adapt and rationalise their practices. Bit like the retail section really.
Plumber Bob who hates his job told me you can't flush away a branch, you have to nip them off into logs.
It is the nearest city centre to Brid but I wouldn’t post about a new building going up in Brid as being in Hull centre.
Well, lazy as in i don't want to write a novel of my opinions and you probably wouldn't want to read it.. online shopping, in the main, is more convenient - you generally get what you want and get a chance to buy it at the cheapest price, without the usual hassle of physical shopping. This is why it's popular, it's not been forced on us. It's a ****ty result for small shop owners and their staff, but a bonus for those that want to run commerce businesses cheaper without a physical presence and paying high business tax, but then this forum and online news is a ****ty result for print newspapers and printing firms. I have never enjoyed shopping, shopping centres/malls such as Bluewater, Meadow hall and those London ones are hell on ****ing earth - the twice a year I'm dragged around them by my daughters is a reminder for me. And driving round Hull city centre trying to find a parking space on a Saturday back in the 1990s was a pain in the arse. No doubt town centres are worse off at the moment, as independent shops are replaced, I agree on this, but then perhaps they have to be converted into residential properties, urban farms, whatever someone more inventive than me can think up. There's only so many coffee shops, charity shops and barbers that can fill the space.
To be fair I do think that we, collectively, have driven it, or at the very least enabled it. There was plenty of clamour for catalogue shopping back in the day. Online shopping isn’t much different. If everyone preferred to go to a physical shop and pay the premium for that then online would die off and shops would be reopening. People want cheap stuff. I’d agree that’s partly driven by wealth inequality meaning it’s more of a necessity, but even those who can afford more still seem to want cheap stuff. Human nature I suppose, but as with most things if people really don’t like it they wouldn’t use it…but they do. Sadly
