OK. We've had:
- Parking costs/restrictions
- Out of town retail centres
- Internet
Now, as someone who studied transport economics as part of my final year paper about transport systems design for my degree in architecture, along with a fair bit of town planning theory, it seems fairly obvious.
First question to ask is why do high street shops exist in the first place?
Simple answer: to provide goods and services for their local populations, and to turn a profit for business owners.
In the past (talking back to the beginnings of urban civilisations with people not having to grow their own food circa 3000 BC) you were generally pretty limited in your options for transport. You went on foot, or if you were better off, you rode a horse. This limited the choices of where you could obtain goods and services to a fairly small geographical area. It might be that you could purchase silk from China or tobacco from the Americas, but most people bought things from local merchants who had access to them.
The industrial revolution brought faster, public transport to countries like the UK. That allowed people to journey farther for their shopping. We saw the creation of large department stores in major cities as they were able to draw upon a geographically larger clientele - if you were well off, it might be worth travelling by train from Guildford up to Selfridges in London for special purchases. Nevertheless, you're not going to be making a journey like that for your meat and potatoes; you'll still go to your local shops.
Now, here's where the transport economics bit comes in. Public transport works best when you have distinct hierarchies of routes, each with their own level of costs of building and maintaining their infrastructure: e.g. foot < bus < train. Each mode of transport feeds the next level up and the net result is that it tends to funnel journeys and people into local and then city centres.
For the person making the journey, each mode of transport up the hierarchy is relatively more expensive to use. Consequently, you're more likely to spend more money and time travelling to make an occasional large purchase (such as furniture) than frequent daily ones (like bread). This pretty well accounts for the retail structure of nineteenth century cities, from the local corner shop up to department stores like Whiteleys of Bayswater and Harrods. High Streets stood squarely in the middle of all of that and serviced a wide range of requirements, indeed probably the majority of them.
Motorised transport, especially the family or personal car, blows that entire model apart. Relative to using public transport, the car allows you to go most anywhere very easily for very little extra cost. Starting from a low base compared with public transport options, the marginal time and cost savings of going one mile into town in your car (especially if you're going to have to hunt for a parking space) compared with going fifteen or twenty are small, while the fixed costs of car ownership encourage its increased use to spread those costs over as many journeys as possible.
For most people, the costs of using public transport are
entirely marginal (i.e. you make additional payment for each journey you use it for).
Moreover, having everyone converge on town centres in cars causes traffic congestion and significant competition for parking space both between individual motorists looking for a parking space and between parking in general and other uses of land.
Increased congestion and land costs in town centres also make it difficult and expensive to distribute goods to shops there.
The first generations of shopping centres (Arndales, etc.) were all city-centre based, but began to suffer as the proportion of their visitors using public transport fell in comparison to those using (or wishing to use) their cars.
I should note that complaints about local councils or private parking companies ripping off motorists ignore the fact that, ultimately, it is necessary to ration parking space useage by one mechanism or another, especially in town and city centres.
Essentially, this is what as led to the the growth of out-of-town supermarkets and retail parks over the last thirty years or so. Placing them on the outskirts of towns, near to major roads, allows many people to access them easily. It also reduces distribution costs for larger retailers: large deliveries to one big store with one large lorry rather than many deliveries to many small stores with small lorries (N.B. the ultimate distribution costs for goods to end users homes are shifted to the consumers themselves by use of their own cars). Places like the Trafford Centre in Manchester can attract people from up to 50 miles away for 95% of their custom. Meantime, places like Trafford or Bluewater can offer a huge variety of shops with which to tempt the public.
Consequently, the economics of the situation make it difficult for high streets to compete for anything but low value items, for which it is not worth travelling far (with commensurately low profits) or perhaps specialist goods and services for which it is worth travelling some distance.
The commercialisation of the internet in the last 15 years or so has only exacerbated the problem, placing local retailers (especially those remaining specialists in the high street) into competition with the entirety of the rest of the global economy, where taxes and other operating costs may be much lower.
Most UK high street retailers don't have the option of shifting their corporation tax obligations offshore, while Amazon have mechanisms for trading within the UK without exposing themselves to the full costs of its tax regime. A local photography shop (and even Amazon UK) will find it extremely hard to compete against a retailer in Hong Kong with lower base operating costs, a slim-to-zero chance that the end user will pay any VAT and Duty due on their goods and the possibility that they can deliver within a couple of days of order.
Again, it is lowered transport costs, this time of goods on a global scale, which have made this possible.
If you're looking for a culprit for the death of the high street, ultimately, it is that the continual reduction in the costs of transporting ourselves and the things we want to buy over the last fifty years or so has made it cheaper (or at least no more expensive or less convenient) to buy elsewhere.
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