Shop closure is part of a bigger story

Big name brands such as the Markets flagship store are a key attraction for shoppers and part of the glue that holds St Peter Port’s retail strategy together.

The media retailer also employs a number of island staff who have been living under a cloud since December when the administrators were brought in for the second time in six years.

Yesterday’s news that Guernsey was to be one of the 27 stores in the British Isles to close was therefore not a surprise, but it is still disappointing.

This, after all, was the shop that missed the first cull in 2013 when Jersey’s HMV was among 100 stores to close.

It would be dangerous, however, to read too much into the news.

This was the closure of one part of a fallen giant, whose trade in music, film, gaming and tech made it peculiarly vulnerable to a rapidly changing market. It had failed to adjust quickly enough to what its bosses called a tsunami of challenges as the purely bricks-and-mortar model crumbled.

Its new Canadian owners, the record store chain Sunrise Records, will have its own ideas for how to survive. Unfortunately, that does not include Guernsey.

In that context, the island store was just a small cog in a machine that linked outlets from the Trafford Centre in Manchester and even the original store in Oxford Street.

Those are also on the scrapheap but nobody would suggest that it indicates their retail sectors are in trouble.

In time, the Markets store will be rented out to a new occupant. What might change is the type of tenant occupying the space, perhaps one not so vulnerable to changing trends.

The new face of retail, brought about in part by the internet and new technology, will mean continued change over the coming decade for shops across the island until eventually a sustainable balance is found between business rents, shopper expectations and the right merchandise for an island population.