Hat tip to Rick the Tuna!
With 140 empty shops in the borough, council bosses think they have come up with a unique way of ensuring shopping areas remain as vibrant as possible.
The first empty shop unit to be given a makeover with a “flat pack” shop front is in Whitley Bay.
North Tyneside Council said the move was cost-effective and would help to attract new investment.
The council said the fake shop in Whitley Bay – which alone has 49 empty units – has been welcomed by traders and shoppers.
‘Attractive to shoppers’
Judith Wallace, North Tyneside Council’s deputy mayor said: “The economic climate has forced many businesses to bring down the shutters.
“We need to ensure that the remaining businesses continue to survive and that means ensuring our high streets look attractive to both shoppers and potential business investors.
“This is a simple and cost-effective approach that keeps the retail unit available for potential new uses and in the meantime also contributes to the street scene.”
Empty shops in Wallsend and North Shields are now being earmarked for similar treatment, which costs about £1,500 a time.
The government-funded project involves colourful graphic designs featuring a range of different shop types, which are either taped inside the windows or screwed to the fascia so they can be removed and reused as required.
Karen Goldfinch, chair of Whitley Bay Chamber of Trade, said: “It’s an excellent way of promoting how a unit can be used, perhaps inspiring new businesses to come into the town.”
Speaking of fake, here’s another Carlsbad realtor in the news:
http://jalopnik.com/5491543/bankrupt-runaway-prius-driver-owns-adult-swinger-site
meanwhile, we found out that Pardee was strategically placing Asian kids doing homework in their models to help boost sales.
(j/k)
CREative.
.
Del Mar Plaza does a similar thing. They paint beachy scenes over the windows. It’s pretty effective- you don’t even notice there’s a vacant store.
http://wcvarones.blogspot.com/2008/10/retail-space-in-del-mar-california.html
We’ve been noticing that at least two storefronts in every strip mall are vacant. Every mall I’ve been by in the past year has at least one anchor store vacant.
The home ATM has been the only thing keeping our economy alive for the better part of the past decade…
Potemkin Stores
Oh I get it. If we paste up false depictions of reality, perhaps our so-called “consumer” economy will magically enter the much-wished-for nirvana of “recovery” — where the orgies of spending on houses and cars and electronic entertainment machines will resume like the force of nature it is presumed to be.
Driving thru western OK last week one sees the small town equivalent in Erick and Hollis, drapes at the show windows in downtown. Both towns looked like there best days were in the 1920s and nothing much in the downtown had changed since. (They are in the core of the area the Okies came from as its to dry for reliable farming around there). So for a small town its just put drapes on the vacant store front. Is in possible that long term in 90 years we will speak of the Calies?
Gives new meaning to “extend and pretend”.
BTW, I didn’t see any fake employees inside that fake storefront. Guess even virtual people can’t get jobs these days.
If they were to show realistic virtual people, it wouldn’t be a pretty sight:
A laid-off engineer — a genial, capable fellow, once valued by his former employer — tinkering in his Ohio basement with a device designed to blow up the headquarters of the health insurance company that has just denied his wife treatment for cancer of some organ or other. Or perhaps the Lounge of a Holiday Inn outside Indianapolis, where Tea Party recruits meet over chicken nuggets to discuss the New World Order, the Bilderberg conspiracy, and the suspicious numbers of Jews in the bonus-padded upper echelons of the Wall Street banks, and what might be done about that…
As Ernest Hemingway once said about how both people and countries go broke: Slowly, and then all at once.
We are teetering on the edge of all at once.
CapitalGain,
If you’re going to quote Kunstler you really should discriminate between his writing and yours and credit his appropriately.