We miss the high-street shops only when they’ve gone – and by then it’s too late

Because retail jobs disappear from the high street in dribs and drabs there is little sense of drama. But there should be, warns Chris Blackhurst

Beales is the latest chain to fall into administration (PA)

It has become a depressingly familiar ritual. A store chain closes, and people come forward to say how much they loved it, and how they will miss it. So it is with Beales, the department store group. A newspaper dispatches one of its reporters to Bournemouth to write about the retailer going into administration.

Step up Edna Southworth and Lis Gray, “clutching half-price bedclothes and duvets” as they leave the shop, now holding its final closing down sale. “I’ve been shopping here for 50 years,” Gray tells The Guardian. “It’s always been the store to come to. It will be such a shame if it vanished from this street and a disaster for the town centre. Our generation grew up with stores like this. They’re a big part of our lives.”

Established in 1881, Beales is shutting simply because not enough folk adhered to the corporate motto: “It has to be Beales”. Alas, too many of them presumably said to themselves: “It has to be Amazon”.