The news last Friday that Starbucks took a £10m hit in the UK last year from the collapse of the Borders bookshop chain offers a piquant reflection on the ongoing transformation of our high streets from retail strips of independent and multiple stores (with banks, and estate agents aplenty) into elongated food courts.

The news last Friday that Starbucks took a £10m hit in the UK last year from the collapse of the Borders bookshop chain offers a piquant reflection on the ongoing transformation of our high streets from retail strips of independent and multiple stores (with banks, and estate agents aplenty) into elongated food courts.

The internet, of course, is the main cause.

We shop online, we bank online and we advertise and search for houses online. But until scientists succeed in transmogrifying food through the ether, lending a whole new dimension to the faddish molecules of cutting-edge cuisine, we don’t yet dine online. “Beam me up Scotty” is not set to boldly go to “Beam me up Big Mac”; at least not, thank God, in my lifetime.

The momentum of this fundamental change to the face and nature of the high street has been energised by a dual revolution in consumer behaviour: ecommerce - or ‘shopping in’ one might say - has been growing at a similarly exponential rate to ‘eating out’.

Specialist bookshops testify unequivocally to the former, just as coffee shops do to the latter - though not necessarily when they’re sited within them.

Long-term eating out trends, despite current economic conditions, are set to continue. In the past 20 years the numbers of people eating out in the UK have tripled: from 7% to 23% for those who do so at least once a week.
In the US this is nearer 50%, which points clearly to the way ahead over here, and the percentage of British people who never dine out has dwindled from almost a quarter of the population to just 3%.

Where we eat is at least as multifarious as where we shop. The spectrum of outlets from fast food chains, through semi-served, such as the highly successful Nando’s, and casual dining formats and pubs, to fine dining, is as complex as across any retail paradigm, with the multi-ethnicity of their offers even more so.

The big difference is that the independents maintain a far higher participation in the eating out sector than their retail counterparts. Consolidation through the emergence of major restaurant chains is another, widely anticipated American-style development.

But should eateries now be classified as shops? This is a question that is challenging my fellow judges and me as we’ve been finalising our shortlists this week from the record-breaking number of entrants for the World Retail Awards (to be announced at the Congress in Berlin this September).

As supermarket and department store operators continue to develop food, financial and other services, and as retail banks have always been known as such, why should food service providers not be called retailers too?

Waitrose, Sainsbury and others are opening standalone cafes while Costa Coffee shops sell bags of coffee beans; so surely they’re grocers one and all?