No matter where you go in the country, you will hear the same concern: online shopping is killing the high street.
It is an understandable worry. Town centres matter. They are places where communities meet, where independent businesses give areas character, and where people feel a sense of local identity. Watching shops close is unsettling, and it is natural to look for a simple cause.
But the problem with the online-versus-high-street narrative is that it skips over a far less comfortable truth.
Many people blame online shopping for the decline of the high street, but the opposite is closer to the truth. The lack of financial support, affordable rents, and structural flexibility makes it very difficult for online businesses to open physical shops. Without these conditions, they cannot move onto the high street, and blaming them for its decline misses the real issue.
The lack of substantial grants for small businesses adds another barrier. Realistically, a small business like Onyx Dragon would need tens of thousands of pounds to cover all start-up, operational, and stock costs before even opening a physical shop. Without this level of financial support, taking on a brick-and-mortar location long term is simply not feasible.
Opening and running a physical shop has become extraordinarily expensive.
Before a single customer walks through the door, a business is often committing to a wide range of fixed and ongoing costs that exist regardless of how busy the shop is.
Property and location
- Commercial rent
- Business rates
- Service charges
- Dilapidations at the end of a lease
Utilities and operations
- Electricity, gas, and water
- Waste collection
- Internet and phone services
- Security systems
Compliance, protection and risk
- Insurance (public liability, contents, employers’ liability)
- Theft and stock-loss insurance
- Security measures required by insurers (alarms, CCTV, shutters)
- Excesses and unrecoverable losses after theft or damage
Staffing and people
- Wages
- Employer National Insurance
- Pension contributions
- Holiday and sick pay cover
Sales, administration and stock
- Card processing fees
- Banking charges
- Accounting and bookkeeping
- Software and licences
- Monthly stock intake, including purchasing, shipping, storage, and seasonal adjustments
- Handling cash, including time spent depositing it, banking fees, and security considerations
Cash is not just money in hand. Depositing it safely takes time, carries risk, and often incurs banking fees, adding another layer of operational complexity that must be managed before any revenue reaches profit or wages.
It is also important to note that sales must not only cover these operational expenses but also the ongoing purchase of stock, which is essential for keeping the business open and serving customers.
Costs of maintaining a holistic business shop
For a holistic business, maintaining a physical shop can easily cost several thousand pounds each month. Rent and business rates, utilities, insurance, security, staff wages, and regular stock replenishment all add up. Even if the owner personally handles some tasks like cleaning, the majority of these expenses are unavoidable and must be covered before any profit or wages can be drawn. This makes the financial pressures of a brick-and-mortar shop extremely high, especially when income is not yet stable.
Fit-out and upkeep
- Shopfitting and signage
- Ongoing maintenance and repairs
- Cleaning (some costs can be reduced if the owner does it personally, but only a small portion)
- Replacement of worn fixtures and displays
Even if the owner handles some tasks like cleaning, most expenses, such as repairs, stock replenishment, and insurance, remain unavoidable.
Many of these costs do not scale with sales. Whether ten people walk through the door or a hundred, they still need paid.
On top of these costs, simply getting customers through the door has become harder. Limited parking, rising council charges, and restrictive time limits make visiting town centres less convenient, a factor that affects footfall every day. These are not matters of preference; they are structural barriers that make running a successful shop even more challenging.
What is often overlooked in these conversations is that none of this includes the owner being paid.
A small business does not generate a wage by default. It has to sell enough to cover every one of these costs first, month after month, before there is anything left to draw as income. In many cases, owners go long periods paying themselves little or nothing, not because the business is failing, but because survival comes before salary.
Sales are not profit. Profit is not wages. And wages are usually last in the queue.
Theft adds another layer of reality to physical retail. When stock is stolen, it is not just an inconvenience; it is inventory that has already been paid for, often only partially recoverable through insurance, if at all. That loss sits on top of already fixed costs, further narrowing the margin a shop has to work with.
When a shop closes, it is easy to say “people just buy online now”. It is much harder to acknowledge that, in many cases, the maths simply no longer works. Customers have not stopped caring about local businesses; the cost of existing in a physical space has outpaced what many businesses can realistically earn, especially once you factor in that the person running it still needs to make a living.
Online selling did not replace the high street. For many businesses, it replaced closure.
That does not mean physical shops are doomed. Some town centres are thriving. Pop-ups, shared spaces, markets, cafés, and experience-led retail can work extremely well in the right conditions. Where rents are realistic, leases are flexible, and costs reflect modern trading, independent shops still succeed.
But blaming online businesses alone avoids asking the harder questions:
- Why are empty units often cheaper to leave vacant than rent affordably?
- Why are business rates still structured around a very different retail era?
- Why is flexibility accepted online but penalised in physical spaces?
- Why is there an expectation that small business owners should absorb personal financial risk indefinitely?
The decline of the high street is not a moral failure by shoppers or sellers. It is a structural problem, and structural problems do not get solved by nostalgia or finger-pointing.
If we genuinely want town centres to thrive again, we need to talk less about where people click “buy” and more about whether opening a door on a high street allows a business not just to exist but to sustainably pay the person behind it.
For Onyx Dragon, these realities are exactly why we operate online only. Choosing not to open a physical shop is not about avoiding community or responsibility; it is about ensuring the business can operate sustainably, pay suppliers properly, and remain viable without passing unsustainable costs on to customers or absorbing personal financial risk indefinitely.
Many online businesses would love to open a brick-and-mortar shop, but they cannot do so until their monthly income reaches a level that can reliably cover all operational costs. Being online is often a practical necessity, not a lack of ambition.
We would love to operate a brick-and-mortar shop in the future, but that will not be possible until our monthly income reaches a level that can sustainably cover all the costs of running a physical location. Until then, staying online is the responsible way for the business to operate.
Online is not a replacement for the high street. For us, it is the way the business can responsibly exist at all.
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