Kerre Woodham: Retail owners and businesses can't hang on any longer

Isn't it cruelly, cruelly ironic that yesterday we were talking about just how tough it is in retail, and we have the news that after 145 years, Smith and Caughey's, the last of the great, grand department stores, famous for the high-end goods, the beautiful Christmas window displays, will close its doors for the final time by July 31st. Ninety-eight jobs will be lost, but it's more losing a bastion of retail, it goes beyond the closure of just the store. It survived two world wars and two severe depressions. It was battling online retail but then a “perfect storm” in 2024 and 2025 meant that it just couldn't carry on. Once it's gone, we won't be seeing the likes of that again.  

So ironic that we were talking just yesterday about the man from JLL saying we need more retail space, a quarter of a million more square metres of retail space over the next five years, and we were like really? How about filling the retail space that exists? That led into the conversation about just how tough it is selling stuff in this day and age. 

Mike Hosking was talking to Viv Beck of Heart of the City this morning, and they agreed that the changes made to the inner city had proved too difficult to navigate.  

“We hoped they'd be able to get through to the opening of the CRL and we have absolutely laid it out, clear as day, to both Auckland Council and Auckland Transport what they needed to do to reduce the barriers to get into the central city. And I think the lack of action is inexcusable. There are fundamental flaws in the way this is being managed, and it has to stop.  

“The reality is it's been an obsession with getting cars out. We've already lost 44% of them since 2015, and yet Auckland Transport seems to think fining people in our nighttime district in Queen Street is acceptable. But the reality is we've got so much good stuff and it is a positive future. The City Rail Link will make access easier, but we cannot tolerate this behaviour anymore. It has to stop.”  

There's so much that went wrong all at once, that so many businesses have been trying so hard to navigate and it's not just an Auckland. We're talking about Auckland right now, but look at Wellington and Hamilton as well. The inner cities are really struggling because of the ideological brain farts of city planners, because of the ideological bent to get vehicles out of the inner city without actually replacing them with any kind of decent public transport, because of Covid, because inner city hotels and motels were turned into waste stations for transients and waifs and strays making it an unappealing place to visit, because of online retail – there are so many reasons why it has been incredibly difficult. They're trying to hang on trying to hang on until the promise from these urban planners, the promises from the transport departments, the promises from the ideologues, that this is going to be a new and bright and beautiful future. That the streets are going to be teeming with throngs of happy people who are desperate to buy whatever it is you've got to buy. And so these businesses are hanging on by their fingernails. “Better days are coming. Better days are coming.”  

Well, some of them cannot hang on any longer, their fingernails are losing the grip in there, slowly scraping their way down the side of the wall. I was on Ponsonby Road yesterday and a fashion designer who's been on Ponsonby Road in the same store for 26 years, she's conceded defeat. She can't do it anymore, she said, she just can't. She's been waiting and waiting and waiting for things to come right and she's run out of money and run out of time. And again, it's the economy, it's Covid, it's the new employment relations rules, it's all of those things. And then just when things start to come right, along comes Trump. There's so much that's happening.  

But she also made the same comment that a lovely young woman from the New Zealand fashion powerhouse Zambezi made – Zambezi's not renewing its lease on Ponsonby Road. Both women said that along with all the difficult times they've experienced over the last five years, they said that their customer base had aged out and they weren't being replaced. That they were trying to reinvigorate their customer base, but the younger generation are just not interested in buying the more expensive New Zealand designed, New Zealand made fashion. The younger woman don’t want to pay those prices.  

So, the kids may well bunk off school to take part in climate emergency protests, and they may well harangue the older generation for bequeathing them a world on fire, but they're not willing to settle for one outfit a year from a New Zealand designer when they could have 50 dresses from Temu. Rather than actually putting their money where their mouths are and not contributing to the ecological environmental climate change disaster of fast fashion, and rather than support New Zealand designers in New Zealand, machinists in New Zealand, pattern makers in New Zealand, they'll go and do their climate protests at lunchtime and then be home in time to make some clicks on Temu and Shein to get their fast fashion. You can see the mountain of fast fashion waste from space. And the kids could do something about it, but they choose not to. And that means that we're going to see more of these closures and more skills and crafts lost as the younger generation just don't care. So I don't think I'll be harangued by a young one about the state of the world anytime soon and take that lightly. 

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