A FASHION retail giant with 500 branches is closing one of its stores today.
The chain will be closing its Northampton store today, having first opened it in 2015
The retail giant Next closes its doors for good at the Grosvenor Centre.
The Next store in Grosvenor Centre had been a mainstay since 2015.
The decision comes amid ongoing struggles for high street retailers up and down the country, with footfall in town centres continuing to decline in the face of online shopping and the cost-of-living crisis.
Residents took to social media to share their frustrations, with one shopper sharing the news on Facebook, saying: “So Next is closing in the Grosvenor Centre, another one gone.”
The post quickly attracted comments from locals who are clearly feeling the pinch of the ongoing high street crisis.
One shopper commented: “Nothing to go into town for these days. It’s so sad.”
While another added: “We have nothing soon in this town.”
A third chimed in, saying: “That’s bad news for the town. We should support our shops. When I was younger, we had such a lot to choose from.”
Another shopper said: “No surprise there—such sad times for our town centre,” capturing the general sentiment of loss and nostalgia that’s sweeping through the community.
A Next spokeswoman confirmed the closure, saying: “We can confirm that the Northampton NEXT store will cease trade on Saturday.”
With the closure just hours away, Northampton shoppers are wondering what’s next for their once-bustling town centre.
The news comes alongside the announcement of atleast six major high street closures this August.
The closures include the once-popular high street card shop Clintons Cards, which shut shop on another two stores this month.
It closed down a store in Bexhill town centre on August 4 and its outlet in the Castlepoint shopping centre in Bournemouth on August 11.
Clintons Cards announced last year that it was considering shutting 38 stores in a bid to avoid insolvency.
Half a dozen stores have already closed including in Cambridgeshire, Cumbria, Hinckley, Kettering and Northamptonshire.
Another popular retailer making cut backs this month was M&S.
They will close its department store in the Belfry Shopping Centre in Redhill, Surrey, on August 17.
The retailer has had a presence in the shopping centre for 33 years and the closure came as a huge blow to locals.
In total, the chain has said it wants to close 67 “lower productivity” sites between 2022 and 2027.
However, it’s not all doom and gloom in the retail industry.
Several other retailers and hospitality venues have plans to expand.
Superdrug has plans to swing the shutters up on 25 new branches in the coming months.
Whilst he parent company of Bonmarché, Edinburgh Woollen Mill (EWM) and Peacocks, Purepay Retail Limited, has said it wants to open 100 new high street stores over the next 18 months.
It has yet to give the exact locations where it will open the 100 stores or when they will open.
Primark is also opening new branches and investing and renovating more than a dozen of its existing shops.
EMPTY shops have become an eyesore on many British high streets and are often symbolic of a town centre’s decline.
The Sun’s business editor Ashley Armstrong explains why so many retailers are shutting their doors.
In many cases, retailers are shutting stores because they are no longer the money-makers they once were because of the rise of online shopping.
Falling store sales and rising staff costs have made it even more expensive for shops to stay open. In some cases, retailers are shutting a store and reopening a new shop at the other end of a high street to reflect how a town has changed.
The problem is that when a big shop closes, footfall falls across the local high street, which puts more shops at risk of closing.
Retail parks are increasingly popular with shoppers, who want to be able to get easy, free parking at a time when local councils have hiked parking charges in towns.
Many retailers including Next and Marks & Spencer have been shutting stores on the high street and taking bigger stores in better-performing retail parks instead.
Boss Stuart Machin recently said that when it relocated a tired store in Chesterfield to a new big store in a retail park half a mile away, its sales in the area rose by 103 per cent.
In some cases, stores have been shut when a retailer goes bust, as in the case of Wilko, Debenhams Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Paperchase to name a few.
What’s increasingly common is when a chain goes bust a rival retailer or private equity firm snaps up the intellectual property rights so they can own the brand and sell it online.
They may go on to open a handful of stores if there is customer demand, but there are rarely ever as many stores or in the same places.
