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Comment by guystone | Hacker News Reader

It comes down to money and the cost of living. Landlords are extracting rent, no room for entrepreneurship.

A race to the bottom, but I wouldn’t blame Amazon. Large multinational chains were hollowing out high streets and making them less pleasant before online shopping.

As another comment said, councils and government should treat high streets more like public commons, prioritising independent businesses and making places distinctive.

What frustrates me is that even prosperous areas with new developments rarely make space for small businesses. Instead, we get “private equity” chain.

Ugh, one I saw recently was Bristol University’s new campus by Temple Meads. The wall between the campus and station could have been lined with small, affordable units for independent and student-run businesses. Would love to browse a few interesting shops or grab a decent sandwich before catching a late train. 23m for a new entrance but where are the opportunities. (This is based off the media announcements, not walked through there yet)

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> councils and government should treat high streets more like public commons, prioritising independent businesses and making places distinctive.

You're advocating central planning.

The real problem is that it's very hard to build stuff in the UK. This is a choice that the people have made and the status quo still continue until they choose differently.

> You're advocating central planning.

Central planning is the status quo. That's essentially what zoning rules are, and why everything is such a mess. You want to open a shop and live above it? No, sorry, not zoned for residential; banned. Operate the shop out of your house instead? Haha, banned. What if your shop really doesn't need very much space at all, so something the size of a closet would do as long as it's in the right location? Nope, minimum unit sizes or similar, prohibited by law. And so on.

If they want to stop doing this that would be great, but if they're not going to stop doing it then having the rules be things like "no chains" instead of "no small units" would certainly be an improvement.

Planning is such a strange thing. "You're not allowed to build homes unless you also build a creche (daycare)" - OK... but I'm a company that builds homes, I don't know anything about running a creche "well then nobody gets to have a home unless you pay up buddy"

It's not out of the realm of possibility for a real estate development company to partner with someone who runs daycares, surely? I'm sure the company that builds the homes already partner with a lot of different companies for specialized tasks?

Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default.

They can, and my statement is a bit of a caricature (it's not like I expect the person pouring concrete to be mixing baby formula a year later) but it seems like "but amenities!" is mostly a way to make sure any new arrivals have to pay for things for existing local residents. Development charges are similar.

Land and real estate is not unlimited especially in urban areas. Building companies optimize for profit so they don't have a good incentive to build out public necessities. It will be always a bit of squaring a circle if you want half sensible area development.

Building companies optimize for profit which is why they have a good incentive to build things that are in short supply. They build whatever the customer buys.

On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.

The requirements are nothing but a type of tax whose revenue is allocated to some de facto government program. But taxes on new development are asinine because they inherently get passed on as higher rents for humans and businesses, and the latter then have to pass them on as higher prices -- or can't afford them and go out of business, which is how you get the high street full of vape shops.

> On top of that, a daycare isn't a type of building, it's a thing you put in the same sort of commercial building you use for any generic purpose.

That does not seem true. Most (though certainly not all) daycares I see in Europe have buildings that have a layout similar to a school with outdoor areas. A daycare doesn’t need a window front but needs a sandpit.

If maximising profit were actually allowed we’d have far more homes. The current rules make sure builders are -not- allowed to build as many homes as needed.

Building companies optimise for profit and this results in them constraining demand by drip feeding houses onto the market to push up prices

> Aside: It feels so absurd that people in some countries leave daycare up to private companies as the default

I feel like the absurdity is the other way.

Consider the two components of a public daycare: Who runs it and who pays for it.

With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.

With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids. Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?

The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves. Whereas if the parent can do higher skilled work then they can still take the job and use the subsidy money to pay for daycare, even if they're not required to use it for that. So the better subsidy is the one in cash.

> With regards to who pays for it, let's even go ahead and assume that we want to have government subsidies for people with kids.

Here in Norway it's heavily subsidized. I don't know what the cost for the parents if it would've been if it weren't. But in this very high-cost country it costs about €200/month to have a child in daycare/kindergarten (ages 1-5, usually run separated in age groups 1-2 and 3-5). Second child simultaneously is cheaper. Third is cheaper still.

> Given that, is it better to give them subsidies for daycare, or just give them the same money and then leave it up to them to buy what they need?

I'm pretty sure that would leave us with extremely variable coverage for those who do choose kindergarten.

> With regards to who runs it, what benefit is there in having the government do it? Given the money, the parents can choose who they want to watch their kids. Unnecessarily turning something that could easily be a competitive market into a monopoly is unwaveringly a bad idea.

I'm a free-marketeer. Yet I'm very much of the opinion that kindergartens are not suited for a "competitive market" (nor are e.g. hospitals). Although I am a free-marketeer, I also believe that these are services that should be available at quality to anyone independently of income. I'm very happy that my children are in kindergarten with children from families making half, and twice, of what my family makes.

> The first one does perverse things, like force a parent to take a minimum wage job and send their kid to a daycare the government is then paying to subsidize at a higher hourly rate than the parent is making from the job they only had to take because the subsidy isn't provided when they stay at home to watch the kid themselves.

How is this perverse? Do we not need people doing low-wage jobs? From your wording I feel almost sure you're American.

> But in this very high-cost country it costs about €200/month to have a child in daycare/kindergarten (ages 1-5, usually run separated in age groups 1-2 and 3-5). Second child simultaneously is cheaper. Third is cheaper still.

Because they're subsidizing the rest of the cost. But that's the issue. If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money? Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare. Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.

> I'm pretty sure that would leave us with extremely variable coverage for those who do choose kindergarten.

It would have a similar effect to having an economy that allowed more families to be sustainable on a single income rather than two. Then fewer of them would need daycare and there might be fewer daycares, but that doesn't seem like a great reason to force more kids into daycare, especially when the consequence would plausibly be something like the nearest one to you is 14 km away instead of 10 km.

> Although I am a free-marketeer, I also believe that these are services that should be available at quality to anyone independently of income.

But now you're talking about the price again.

Suppose the actual unsubsidized cost for providing quality service is X. If you provide a daycare subsidy for each child in the amount of X, it costs the government X, and then everyone can afford daycare. If you instead provide a cash subsidy for each child the amount of X, it costs the government X, and still everyone can afford daycare, because paying for it costs X and they received X in cash to use for that or anything else at their choosing.

> How is this perverse? Do we not need people doing low-wage jobs?

It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.

And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.

> Because they're subsidizing the rest of the cost.

I know. I used the price as an example to indicate how heavily subsidized it must be.

> If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?

Because the market for daycare will favor the well-off. You're just topping off the income of people who need daycare, then leaving everyone to fend for themselves. That's often OK. I think there are some sectors where it's not. Kindergartens being one. This is, for both of us, of course just opinions.

> Then if they want the daycare, nothing much changes, they just hand the cash to the daycare.

And if you hand off more cash, you get better daycare. And less cash, worse daycare. I'm totally fine with that logic for TVs and cars, not so much with our children. Even from a purely capitalist perspective: a major force in capitalism is rewarding and thereby incentivizing useful behavior – what behavior of the children are we incentivizing (resp. disincentivizing) by sending them to a good (resp. bad) kindergarten? It's absurd.

> Whereas if they prefer to raise their own kids and one of the parents wasn't working a high paying job to begin with, now you're not heavily subsidizing exclusively the option they find less desirable.

And now you've taken a person out of the labor force. Possibly forever. Granted, there are some big open questions about the labor force going forward, but looking back decades it's been clear that that's a bad thing in western societies.

> It's perverse because you're having the government pay e.g. $10/hour to subsidize their working a job that only pays $8/hour, when they could have done the thing the government is subsidizing themselves, had a $2/hour surplus if that didn't cost them the subsidy, and been happier because they get to spend time raising their kids instead of spending that time at a call center doing telemarketing.

None of this makes much sense in most cases. In my municipality, kindergarten employees are responsible for roughly 5 small children or 8 big children at any given time. There are no full-time jobs in this country that pay a fifth of a kindergarten employee's salary (yes yes, there are overheads etc).

But yes, I can see the math maybe working out if you have 4 children under the age of six and are working as e.g. a cleaner. Maybe. I think that's a very small segment of society. And you know, I'd much rather still send those kids to kindergarten, have them play with the children of millionaires and children like themselves all day, while the parent retrains for a job they'd rather do.

The person having so many children on such a low income is probably also living in very confined space. I'm sure those kids love the change of scenery!

> And the way you get people to do the necessary "low-wage jobs" under those conditions is to pay them more.

I agree that useful jobs should be well-paying enough that recruiting people into them doesn't require applying extra societal pressure. Of course.

> I used the price as an example to indicate how heavily subsidized it must be.

The amount of the subsidy is an independent question. Regardless of the amount you choose, it can then be in kind or in cash.

> Because the market for daycare will favor the well-off. You're just topping off the income of people who need daycare, then leaving everyone to fend for themselves.

If you give someone with less money the amount of money it takes to pay for a quality daycare, they obviously now have the money to pay for it -- you've just given it to them.

At which point there are two possibilities, right? One is, they use it for that, in which case your objection doesn't apply. It's the same thing as happens if daycare was provided in kind.

The other is, they use a less expensive daycare because they need something else more than they need the more expensive daycare, e.g. they would use the extra money to buy food. Then what you're really doing is forcing them to use the more expensive daycare when given the choice they'd have used the money for something they regard as more important. That's not actually helping them when they're right, but assuming they're wrong is assuming that you know their circumstances better than they do.

> And now you've taken a person out of the labor force. Possibly forever.

Only under the assumption that being a homemaker isn't work.

> None of this makes much sense in most cases. In my municipality, kindergarten employees are responsible for roughly 5 small children or 8 big children at any given time. There are no full-time jobs in this country that pay a fifth of a kindergarten employee's salary (yes yes, there are overheads etc).

Daycare as a business/government has costs that daycare as a family member doesn't. The former needs a separate piece of real estate to operate out of, insurance against claims by the family, the full complement of support staff for accounting/legal/HR/etc. The latter uses their own home which is a sunk cost and doesn't require the rest of it because they're not an organization.

> If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?

They did, for many years. It was a flagship policy of the Christian Democratic party. Labour and the left didn't like it because it was seen as keeping women dependent and out of the labour force (I think something like 90% of the time, it was the woman who took advantage of the subsidy). The far right didn't like it, because it was very often the wrong kind of woman who chose to stay at home with their 2 year old. So it was steadily reduced until I think it was removed entirely.

It should also be said that a lot of parents who took the stay at home subsidy didn't actually stay at home, but hired a nanny instead of sending their children to kindergarten. That got disapproval even from the traditionalists.

>If you're going to pay that amount, why not just give the parents the money?

Because having each parent have to go to a privatized daycare utimately costs more, for a worse service than it being a public service. It also reinforces social segregation, where wealthy parents can afford to put their children into the fancy daycare, while poorer ones either don't (which is horrible for the children), or have them in run down, overcrowded day cares.

> Because having each parent have to go to a privatized daycare utimately costs more, for a worse service than it being a public service.

Why would it work in such a way for this when it works the opposite for everything else?

> It also reinforces social segregation, where wealthy parents can afford to put their children into the fancy daycare, while poorer ones either don't (which is horrible for the children), or have them in run down, overcrowded day cares.

If the subsidy is enough to pay for the "fancy" daycare then everyone can afford it because everyone gets the subsidy. If it isn't, you haven't done that to begin with, because then the public daycare is underfunded and the wealthy parents use their money to opt out of it regardless of whether it's operated by the government.

And why even have regulations?! Any idiot can look after a few kids!

It's not strange at all, without zoning you get shops (and buildings) which extract all the shared value of a community and give nothing back.

I live in a tourist town in Norway. There are some nice shops. A nice cafe run by some Italians, a coffee place which started out as a church initiative (then got kicked out from their original locale when it turned out they were much, much better at selling good coffee than evangelizing) which has awesome concerts and an art gallery, to name two of my favorites.

There are also tourist tat shops. Dozens of them. One prominent one at the entrance to the main shop with a blinged-out AI generated moose. Oh, and casinos - I mean bingo places. They just extract money. The owners don't live here, so they don't care. They're parasitic, they might well go broke without the few positive externality shops around them - but they make more money than those decent shops. And landlords set the rent accordingly.

Of course there's one place where they do central planning, where they realize that externalities are crucial in retail and charge rent accordingly, and where there's not a single tourist tat shop. That place is the mall.

> It's not strange at all, without zoning you get shops (and buildings) which extract all the shared value of a community and give nothing back.

I don't see that in Japan, which is very liberal in zoning. Taiwan is less liberal but doesn't pick which shops. Both are wonderful countries with vibrant, dynamic cities. We have friends in both places, and family in the latter, and life is quite pleasant.

I get that if building homes somehow created more people. What we have now is people living in cars, people and their kids living in 1 room apartments, etc. and we're telling them "it is better for you to live in horrible conditions than it is for us to build new homes because we won't have all the amenities (half the time this is just code for 'parking') built by the developer"

So a child living in the middle of nowhere gets to never see their parent because that parent spend 4 hours a day commuting, because building flats in the city isn't allowed. Where is that kid going to daycare now?

Huh? I don't get what this has to do with what I wrote. That sounds like it is about residential zoning requirements. You can build flats here, and especially you can section your old buildings into umpteen tiny apartments. You can't tear down the architecture that makes this town a tourist destination, but that's about it.

(Actually you can do that to, if you just buy it up and let it fall into disrepair, argue it has no value now and tear down everything but the facades. That's how we got the aforementioned mall)

Because without planning there would be only houses and no daycare. Apartment complexes are the most profitable type of building (everybody needs an apartment to live), at least in my country, and daycares and schools are other infrastructure are not profitable and not worth investing if investor had a choice. They are a burden. So they make investor have no choice and carry a burden.

Where do those kids go to daycare now?

It's possible those kids don't yet exist. Among others, because would-be parents can't afford to work part-time or give up one job to care for the kid.

Is it real estate developer's problem? He builds the building, sells out the apartments and leaves. Where the buyer will put their kids is the buyer's problem.

I agree, I just think there’s some idea that people and cars are magically conjured into existence when homes are built, as though they are currently using no facilities.

In SF, which has alot of old buildings (relative to US suburbs), most daycares run out of the first floor of a house. Same for many of the local, walkable neighborhood retail corridors, it's just not as obvious because the first floors were converted to retail and restaurants 80-100+ years ago and it looks like they were always there. Sometimes an extra floor of residential was added to make way for the ground-level commercial; cheap at the time as you only needed to meet basic safety codes.

Then zoning happened and the process stopped, particularly for retail and dining. Zoning means it's expensive to convert residential spaces to commercial, and vice-versa, if you're allowed at all. So to make it work you gotta build new and bigger. But that's expensive, and the way commercial financing works means new commercial construction only pencils out for chains. The numbers work even if the space would stay empty, because even a bunch of small shops couldn't afford the rent that needs to be advertised for the space to make the financing pencil out.

Basically, zoning causes problems that are then addressed with more regulations, which causes more problems.

And also, people need to adjust their expectations. Small commercial and services spaces will rarely be able to bring in enough revenue to pay rent in a brand new multistory steel building, no matter the floor area. These businesses can only thrive in old buildings, at least in advanced, high-labor cost economies. But you can't build new old buildings. All you can do is make it cheap and easy for the market to repurpose existing spaces to meet demand, and do this everywhere, not just in a corridor you're planning for (otherwise you're not actually allowing low-end spaces to emerge; a Starbucks will snap it up; there's needs to be enough of these spaces to allow the entire market to shift down). But zoning and approval processes create an economic environment antithetical to this.

If you want to keep your zoning and planning but are frustrated the free market doesn't do what you demand it to do, the state needs to build the darn spaces themselves and rent them out. But they don't like to do that because, shocker, it's really expensive to do things the way they demand. When the state (and community via taxes) has to internalize the costs of these demands directly rather than point fingers, it turns out they have trouble justifying the expense.

But if you don't do that, what you end up with is housing projects - "villages", they're often called in the marketing brochure, built on greenfield sites with no access to amenities except by car. They're expensive, built to really crappy standards, and there's kind of nothing for anyone to do except stare at their huge flat-screen TV mounted too high on their grey-on-grey living room wall.

That happens because development is so absurdly regulated that the only way to get it done is to amortize your fixed costs over the whole "village" and then once that's done there's no subsequent infill development because those little things can't absorb the fixed costs.

No, it's not regulated at all. That's the problem.

Any developer can buy up a patch of land, throw up some houses in a month so close together that if you run out of toilet paper you can just reach out your window and use some of your neighbours, and with a design life just the same as the mortgage.

Oh the access road totally buggers up traffic along the existing road? Oh well too bad, full speed ahead and damn the externalities!

This leads to the situation that's arisen in a housing development (described as a village, where it's really about 300 houses crammed into a small field), where the houses have in fact not made it to their design life of 25 years and have had to be demolished at about 15 years old.

So, you've got people paying a £400,000 mortgage on a patch of rubble and mud, who are currently taking up space in council housing with the taxpayer footing the bill. But hey! At least it provided a lot of shareholder value! Full speed ahead and damn the externalities!

The developer needs planning, what do you mean not regulated?

This needs to be weighed against the externalities of homelessness. And if traffic is a problem, remove the cars and add bike infra (bloom Merwede is an example of this, albeit in a very expensive city).

Where are houses from 2011 being torn down? Short of mica that seems ridiculous.

Yeah, but getting planning is no obstacle, they'll just get that handed to them.

Bike infrastructure works great in urban parts of Holland. It doesn't work well in rural Scotland. I'll tell you what - I'll scrap my 30-year-old Range Rover agricultural machinery if you can demonstrate how a bakfiets can replace it.

These particular houses are in the outer part of Greater Glasgow. They're about 15 years old, the framing is absolutely rotten, and the crappy brickwork is literally falling apart. There's no saving them. They were build quickly and cheaply and sold at a premium price, like everything else.

Do they throw in a lot of sweeteners to make the planners happy? Nevermind things like green belt rules, etc. Though I am not familiar with the particulars of Scottish law (right to build is England-only I think?)

Worth noting that cycling works great in rural Netherlands too...

For what it's worth, I made a video about cycling infrastructure and urbanism in rural Ireland (where I used to live). Not the same as Scotland but maybe there are parallels - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ba7xHUdeew . In some ways rural areas are better suited to bike infra than suburban because you have more space and there's generally less traffic. And many rural areas are still a reasonable distance from a town - in fact, I found that when I was driving, I'd just go to Tullamore or Athlone, but on my bike, I'd ride to Clara, a much closer and smaller town. If more people did this it might help revitalize smaller towns.

I'm not seeing anything about a wave of house demolitions in Glasgow except for a lot of old postwar towers and, oddly, this - https://www.urbanrealm.com/news/2023/06/11/glasgow-house-dem... - where the house seems quite nice.

> Do they throw in a lot of sweeteners to make the planners happy?

You mean inconveniently mislaid bulging brown envelopes?

Yes, of course they fucking do, it's the only way they get away with it.

The article is from the UK where two stories buildings with a shop on the street front and accommodation above is very common.

U.K. planning is decided by local councils

It's decided by local councils together with corporations, rather than what it should be, local councils together with local residents.

It’s decided main by a rules based system. Companies are better at navigating that system, locals who invariably object (a tiny minority) just whine about things that aren’t relevant. These rules are created by local councils and driven from things like local plans which are approved by local residents in local referendums. I’ve seen residents approving the local plan saying “houses should be built in this area” and then 6 months later start protesting about a development in that very area.

If they want to change planning they can elect a government to change the rules to a “don’t build anything” system. Fortunatly the population as a whole doesn’t do that.

Zoning in the American sense doesn't exist in the UK, outside of Local Development Orders and (maybe, if you squint a bit) the system of Brownfield Land Registers.

Outside those very limited exceptions, planning in the UK is done on a discretionary basis, and both the discretionary system and the LDOs are overseen by Local Planning Authorities made up of elected local councillors.

There's no central planning authority, and the system is designed to be flexible at the cost of providing less certainty to developers. Mixed use developments are the norm here, and most new residential blocks will have some form of commercial or social space on the ground floor.

Only to the extent that all government is central planning, as I read it. Your sewage system is centrally planned, but that's okay, right?

The UK can't make stuff because the rent is too high. Fix this and a lot of stuff downstream of it will change.

Central planning is making the rent too high. The UK isn’t rich enough for stuff to be expensive because of extremely high demand. Its expensive because it’s too hard to build stuff.

Maybe they should fix that.

The UK wouldn’t accept the pain necessary to start making things again just like we were never going to accept the changes needed to make Brexit a success.

How could we have made Brexit a success? I really didn't see many people saying how we could do that.

Redefine success to “kids leave school for factory jobs and never have to hear someone speak another language”, tada.

The people who were talking about Brexit for decades turned out not to have a plan. Shocking. That's populists for you.

Have you tried being more racist? I understand that's the solution.

Rather than taking an introverted look at political power, money and devolving English power from Westminster, in a similar manner as the NI, Scott and Welsh nations to fund investments outside of London.

Perhaps looking at national infrastructure, and agreeing what we want to see in towns and cities then using tax incentives to encourage desired behaviour.

Or we could just blame Europeans for British political decisions. That's been working well.

Making brexit a success is scheduled right after proving P = NP. You know, because we do the easier things first to keep the queue short.

What pain? All you have to do is lower the rent.

Real brexit has never been tried!

> The UK can't make stuff because the rent is too high.

the uncomfortable truth is it would make property less interesting for foreign money flowing in the UK.

The real problem is that everyone wants the best land in the best places and we've been arguing about it ever since.

Maybe some amount of central planning wouldn't be bad? Maybe when it's broad strokes designations of public space usage and not how many toilet paper rolls one gets it can be a net benefit?

> You're advocating central planning.

Which seems to be working pretty well in China.

When Britain was building new towns post WWII it involved a lot of central planning, and seemed to go pretty well.

For what it’s worth I had the same thought as the ancestor post. Town squares are as privatization friendly as water, electricity, and oxygen. We just took it for granted that they were self sustaining as a public amenity and are now suffering because rich people bought up everything and are renting it back to us at half the quality and twice the price.

> You're advocating central planning.

You state this like it's inherently something to be avoided but you give no reason for believing so

There is already central planning, it's just done between the state and corporations, which also includes landlords. They're advocating for a result that would be accomplished by corporations playing less of a role and local residents and workers playing a greater role in the planning.

See the Astley (Wigan) Warehouses and SIP car parks for two prime examples.

>You're advocating central planning.

The only way to make a functional society that doesn't leave people behind, yes ?

>You're advocating central planning.

So? Nothing wrong with that.

What is your definition of "central planning" that you think it is good ??

Do some bunch of government clerks decide EVERY single _factory_ input and output in whole country is nothing wrong ? Starting with impossibility to do it right - is doing it by necessity wrong is not wrong ?

Do "central" setting prices for whole country, let say for next quarter - no matter reality - is possible ? I lived it and tell you: it's always wrong because it's impossible to do.

How you plan problems in production ? How you out-plan so someone stepped on something fragile ?

How you out-plan someone steal something ? Because "central planning" is sign that it's not good in your country so there is stealing and corruption on every step starting from "planners" to plans distributor to workers to packers to sellers.

How you like that reality now ?

Communism fall for a reason: stupidity of the imagined aka planned system. Because in all despotic systems on top of all of what needs to be done to live and work planned good life you have grafted parasitic structure of peoples which single occupation is just to spy on and terrorize their own peoples - and that costs a lot both in money and society quality.

Lack of freedom do this.

You are attacking a straw man here. No-one here is advocating the total central planning of everything, that's been tried in Soviet-style communism and shown to be disastrous. I also agree with you on the basic principle that society should have as few centrally imposed rules as possible.

But some degree of central planning for at least some of society's operations has always been essential to make a civilized society work. Laws, regulations, taxes and subsidies, and natural monopolies such as armed forces, police forces, fire services and wide area road networks, are all centrally planned in modern societies.

Just as communist-style total regulation of everything has always failed, total deregulation has also been shown to fail everywhere it has been tried, as someone will always step into the resulting power vacuum and take control. If you disagree with me on this, please give me an example of a stable anarchist society that does not ride of top of someone else's regulated society.

The only question is where you put the boundaries.

For example: we prevent companies from producing bread with arsenic in it, even if producing it would be more economically efficient for that company. Is this something you would advocate?

Excuse me but did you read to what I was answering ?

Dude straight said, citing from memory: So ? Nothing wrong with it.

And I asked about his definition of central planing.

And I then described central planing from East block - Soviet and rest of occupied countries.

So if someone not see badness in what is most known failure of central planing then this is quite wtf.

And what is your definition of central planning because looks like you do not see difference between "law and regulations" and central planning that already happened on Earth.

But if someone makes boundaries foggy or meaningless then there is lack of sense in discussion.

But actually you must be trolling - how on the Earth universal restrictions in poisoning land in discussion about central planned economy ??

everything wrong with that. it simply doesn't work!

What makes vape and nail shops uniquely able to afford these rents?

They sell fairly space-efficient, expensive products or services. Generally speaking, the higher you push rent per square foot, the fewer types of businesses you can operate, because people and products take up space and have throughput limits. Nail and beauty services can get spendy fast.

The US has something similar going on with medical and dental offices for the same reasons.

The other US phenomenon is mega-chains which can operate at much narrower margins (or even negative margins in some marquee locations).

To be fair, that specifically is not a US phenomena. Flagship stores that operate as a loss purely for the prestige of a location have existed basically since the dawn of modern retail. Operating in Manhattan or on the Champs Elysees is a sign you are a serious grownup store.

The flagship stores yes, but that was the special case (which is universal) of the more US-specific case of e.g. "why the fuck are there Chipotles everywhere"

Oh i see. Yeah, the corporate structure of “landowners with a business attached” is somewhat uniquely dominant in America. Though not totally unheard of, Japanese rail companies are property developers for example with attached department store chains, etc. so that trains and property drive foot traffic to each other.

Outgoings are different - cheap/dodgy imports, and modern slavery (nail salons are infamous for this) mean that their outgoings can be much lower than other shops. There’s also the tax avoidance many of these businesses partake in, both in the traditional cash-in-hand-business fashion, and the more modern(?) “American Candy store” way (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61777445)

Hold On Right There.

There are people go out of their way to buy...American candy in the UK?

Utterly perverted.

They're some kind of tax/ business rates scam judging by how many there are.

Numerous reports over many years that they don't have many real customers and exist mainly to enable a tax scam / money laundering.

Links for the disbelieving

2022 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61777445

2025 https://www.cityam.com/how-money-laundering-took-over-our-hi...

(Yes, at the M&Ms shop in Leicester Square. Probably never visited by anyone from London, just tourists.)

But the "American Candy Shop" places were/are doing money laundering and/or tax fraud. They can say they sold individual candies for £0.50 (cost: 5p each), the profit goes to a shell company in the Virgin Islands etc, and before the business taxes are due the company "goes bust" and disappears. Then a new one takes its place.

4 years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/04/us-swe...

This year: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/18/dodgy-shops-ha...

No, which is why it's so transparent that these are money laundering operations

i mean just talking for me: american pop culture is just so omnipresent, that even from europe i know what pop tarts, gushers, mountain dew and a wendys is.

All these stores dont exist in my country, you can buy watered down mountain dew, pop tarts for 10€ per box and the local fast food chains are mcdonalds, burger king and subway with an occasional kfc and a metropol city may have a pizza hut.

Sure its all marketing, but if im paying 10€ for a delivery pizza i at least want the box to look like a domino piece.

Most of US sweets ive tried were okayish, my favorite being reeses small cups. Was disappointed by how bad cheeze-its are, they were given away in stores as the sales were so poor and started with a money back promotion and still didnt get sold. Takis seem to have found their way, also taco bell (i know its tex-mex, but still a variety from burgers) opened stores in germany and the netherlands hoping it reaches a broader audience and can get more people attracted as i actually like the food given the price point and being somewhat more healthy than a quarter pounder with cheese.

Softdrinks on the other hand really do taste better. European Gatorade is cat piss compared to US Gatorade. Mountain Dew like i said is only the base version and even this tastes watered down. Hoping for a baja blast rollout in EU with taco bell making a push here. Dr Pepper is really awful in europe compared to american dr pepper but at the end its all about personal preference. Ive seen a lot of americans loving Moser Roth Chocolate from the european Aldi which is their expensive version of good chocolate but still at a discounter price. People that love this would probably die for godiva or leonidas chocolate.

>that even from europe i know what pop tarts, gushers, mountain dew and a wendys is.

I mean, I know they exist too, but that's orthogonal to wanting to eat any of it...

>Was disappointed by how bad cheeze-its are,

My experience is that Cheez-Its are more often than other chips or crackers, likely to go stale on the shelf-might have something to do with the recipe.

>also taco bell (i know its tex-mex, but still a variety from burgers) opened stores in germany and the netherlands hoping it reaches a broader audience and can get more people attracted as i actually like the food given the price point and being somewhat more healthy than a quarter pounder with cheese.

For many years in RI, Taco Bell was the only mexican place we had. Finding authentic Tex-Mex was worth a trip (as far as North Carolina) when I was in 7th grade. As for it being healthier than a QP...ymmv depending on the menu....

As for drinks...how do you screw up Gatorade & Dr Pepper? The syrup/powder just needs to be reconstituted...is it something in the water?

Also, yes, Moser Roth chocolate at Aldi is a steal, quality-wise.

I have seen more distinct candy brands/types in those shops than I ever have in the US. Plus jars of marshmallow goo called “Fluf” for some reason?

> Plus jars of marshmallow goo called “Fluf” for some reason?

The fudge recipe on the back is actually really good FYI

Also the containers are a nice pliable rubbery plastic so they're good to repurpose for garage use.

Marshmallow Fluff is used, amongst other things, to make the traditional questionably-nutritious New England delicacy, the Fluff & Peanut-Butter Sandwich, or fluffernutter. Around the Boston area, it was used more or less like euros use nutella.

They're great for money laundering.

Who's to say how many clients a nail bar had? A box of fake nails is easily dumped in the bin.

Yes, one of the accounting bodies started warning a few years ago about the proliferation of barber shops being a front for money laundering.

The only way I can think to police it, would be for tax inspectors to stand outside and count the customers!

In fact that's exactly what large enforcement operations against these do, the problem is that they just close down, the person who they were registered to disappears(if they ever existed at all) and another shop opens in the same place registered to someone else. It's a game of whack a mole.

It's just stupid that councils have no problem arguing that say, Clarkson(sorry, stupid example) can't open a pub in a town with no other pub or other employment opportunities, but 17th vape shop on the same street is fair game and free market.

Pubs are regulated by a limited amount of alcohol licenses, which goes back centuries. Do you really want there to be licenses for other industries as well?

That's not what I said nor implied.

It's not about licences - councils can absolutely decide if a business can or can not operate in any area already, regardless of licence requirements.

> Do you really want there to be licenses for other industries as well?

Yes. I'm surprised that business licenses aren't already a thing.

I expect a competent government to issue licenses to barbers based off them proving hygiene standards, trained staff with college diplomas in hair-dressing, number of employees, and an extremely limited number of these to be issued based off local need calculated from population by census.

I expect local government to issue similar licenses for all other industries, who should prove their competency, adherence to standards, jobs created, and cater to local needs.

I think the real problem is that if we got rid of money laundering the budget would be even more screwed.

Vape shops sell addictive products and they have minimal overhead. I think the markup on a lot of what they sell, especially the more grey market stuff like nitrous oxide "whip cream chargers" and poppers, is quite high.

A lot that I see have extremely cheap-looking fixtures and little to no decor, and unlike virtually any other store, they stock what they stock, which is generally the same as every other vape shop, and don't even bother to fill out the entire space if it would hold more merchandise.

I assume some are able to negotiate lower rents in exchange for short term leases while the store is technically still on the market for a long-term lease, similar to a pop up store. A lot that I've seen could be shut down, with all the merchandise and equipment loaded into a UHaul, within a few hours if necessary.

Nail salons are similar. They really should have custom ventilation systems since they're working with paints and solvents and glues and nail drills/lathes, but this seems to not be enforced since they're seen as girly little spas rather than industrial workshops and are often staffed by poor immigrants.

They sell something that doesn't work so well online or at a supermarket. Ditto barbers, phone repair, or whatever racially-coded tabloid bugbear de jour. They work in a town centre, everything else can't beat the prices set by larger (often American-owned) businesses.

You can buy a vape online, but as a smoker, you don't want to wait a day when you've run out. Also as a smoker, I don't get why they're not regulated like tobacco. They shouldn't be sold alongside sweets, and should otherwise be treated like cigs (e.g. on packaging, licensing, advertising etc.). Seems very low-hanging legislative fruit.

> and should otherwise be treated like cigs (e.g. on packaging, licensing, advertising etc.).

I think you don't know why cigarettes are treated the way they are.

Hint: it's not because they are addictive. After all, caffeine is addictive and both tea and coffee is effectively unregulated.

Surface area needed is much smaller than most other shops.

They can’t. They tend to turn over like the rest. But as others noted, their low upstart costs makes them the more likely tenant out of other busines models on the sidelines seeking rent.

We all want little cutsey shops and such but how much money for that is actually sitting on the sidelines at any given time ready to pounce? Hardly any at all, if any. Nail shops and other bullshit on the other hand? There’s private equity specialized in selling shares of these schemes.

I rent a workspace outside of my home, I'm paying less than 150 quid for a room in a light industrial zone. Gives me space for my fun stuff as well as work. I love having my own space, and it's very affordable.

I was just looking at the prices for city centre commercial rental in my nearest town. Huge spaces available, it's generally more per month, and I'd be worried about the rates threshold, but at a lower price point we'd be in business.

I think there's something to that. More people using a centre for work would create more opportunities in towns.

Again, I think the challenge the UK has is the gross differential between incomes and the cost of buying or renting property. Unsustainable, and very much part of these morbid symptoms.

It’s the single biggest problem facing society. If we could stop this rent extraction the economy would prosper.

That is a very valid point. However, I suspect that some of the businesses that managed to survive transitioned into operations that function solely as fulfillment centers for dispatching packages.

The issue with that approach is that it results in numerous vacant spaces, which fail to attract enough foot traffic to be appealing to other businesses.

There was a struggling shopping mall near my home. Many retailers left the premises after one of the big stores shut down. Recently some other big brand occupied the space, in a couple of months besides it there is a Samsung store and an apple store. Now all spaces are busy and they stay busy all week long.

This makes me suspect that we highly optimised for the "2010s" online era without considering the side effects.

Don't forget the brutal taxes in the UK in relation to the current economic circumstances.

The UK economy has faltered and not had a chance to recover since 2008. The more recent improvements really because of a reproachment of Brexit and global concerns around the US are welcome but not necessarily structural improvements in the UK.

It's no coincidence that the businesses that can easily evade tax and usually also sell illegal goods are the ones that dominate the high street.

San Francisco forbids formula stores in many places. Okay, so we don't have a Chipotle and a Nordstrom Rack on Valencia St, but then a burrito on it costs $24.

Bristol is not SF. The cost of living is vastly less in the uk, especially outside of London.

okay but why? cost of living is less in america's burbs too. you are getting cause and effect reversed: the huge chain stores and PE firms, they are very efficient, i mean that's why they grow so big, and being efficient is strongly associated with lower prices.

PE firms are efficient... at maximising equity. A good example of what they do is find the maximum viable price consumers will pay.

A small business might be less accurate - figure out a "reasonable rate", and therefore charge less.

In stuff like restaurants though it translates to increased margin not lower prices. Mom and pop restaurant margin is like a few percentage points if you are successful. Some franchises sniff 10 even 25% for say a chic fil a.

A burrito at Chipotle in San Francisco is already like >$20. That's just the state of things.

it's $12.65... you can order online at a san francisco location and see for yourself...

Every town in the UK looks the same now, same shops, bars and restaurants, sad.

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