When i lived in Worcester last year, Foregate Street was lined with estate agents, prime city centre real estate and there was about fifteen of them one after the other. They survived on the boom in property rather than offering any unique service. Sensible agents will have realised this was not maintainable and saved for a rainy day.
Not being a politician i can say the truth, we need a clean out like this from time to time, its part of how the real world operates. Life evolves.

I wouldn’t go quite so far as to celebrate when someone in the private sector loses his or her job.

But I do recall my impression of having been touched by something dirty when the estate agent who early in the boom tried to get me to sell my London flat cheaper than my asking price, when I wouldn’t budge two days later produced three buyers who offered the asking price. Then had the audicity to charge 1.5%

The solicitor who did the legal work provided much more value for money.

Adam: “they were awful sales agents whose promotions of their properties amounted to sticking a photo in their window, most of which were years out of date.”

Yes.

Adam: “Those who put in the slightest effort will survive a mild downturn in house prices after years of growth”

Other than this is anything but a mild downturn, (British bankers assn. report mortgage approvals are down from 65,000 at the peak to 17,000 ), but quality should be the factor that decides if a company survives.

By the way, quality is not snobbery.

I read that half of Britons estate agents lost their jobs and celebrated. I hope the woman who was rude to me a few years ago lost her job, they were awful sales agents whose promotions of their properties amounted to sticking a photo in their window, most of which were years out of date.
Those who put in the slightest effort will survive a mild downturn in house prices after years of growth

Equally I wanted some things from Boots but waited until my proper plastic points card turned up so that I could get eight points per pound on my first transaction with it by using a special extra coupon.

So much of my spending was on things that I had either wanted for a while or was in need of and I did it when I would either spend the least or get a big points advantage to save money down the road. The VAT reduction of 2.5% saved a few pence I expect – that will come in handy when the NI hike kicks in….

Profit is king and even an empty warehouse after a sales binge needs filling, and how to do it with no profit margin?

The old saying comes to mind and is very apt here as the media makes much of the sales… the man who works for nothing will never be short of work.

As to Woolworths…4000 jobs at Rover were worth £125million to Brown and Labour, so how much is 27000 jobs worth? Unless of course those jobs are spread out over a large area and not a threat to local activists voting base? Or am I just being cynical?

You lot (Tories) really must start shouting the message out in simple and real terms for the masses to digest in small dollops.

There’s a big media narrative about savvy shoppers leaving it later every year. The recent Woolworths sale undermines this a bit with their initial ‘up to 50% sale’ that duped many into buying when the discount was only 10% (7.9% really when you bear in mind the VAT cut wasn’t passed on).

Unfortunately, survival will be less down to gifted retailing and more down to how much of the estate is freehold and whether the debt can be refinanced or not. The current environment is so harsh that you can have a large market share, mopping up most of the available spend, but still be struggling to make ends meet.

Outmoded business models are a favourite analysis for failing businesses. Take the car industry, for example, the standard line is they didn’t adapt their products to environmentally friendly models people want to buy. It’s nonsense though, if cheap car loans were still available people would still be merrily buying 4×4s. Any car manufacturer who’d decided to go over to an entirely green product range would be calling the administrators. The car industry churned out SUVs because that was what people wanted to buy. The slowdown was too fierce and the timeframe too small for them to be fairly expected to have re-invented themselves.

Just about all the high street retailers are stuffing their “sales” with specially bought-in seconds.

They don’t think as much about right product, right price and right place as about there’s a lot of right mugs.

Reply: Yes, there is always a lot of special sale merchandise, which some like. There are also genuine bargains from heavily discounted regular stock, as I have seen for my self again this year.

When the surviving shops re-stock after their current currency hedges and supply contracts expire, we will presumably see inflation for imported items. Buy what you need now if you can!