OUR high street is on life support and many big companies, often thought too big to fail, are failing. From clothes shops to travel agents the reset button has been hit on the high street and many people are now wondering what our towns and cities will look like post Covid-19.

We know that online shopping had been increasing exponentially. There were many predictions that online shopping would change the face of the retail sector. But, paradoxically, it was a real virus not a computer one that shut down the country.

Only those with a strong online presence seem to be weathering the storm, but even they are taking a major hit as the country resets itself to a new way of life.

I’m not a retail analyst or expert, so I can’t claim to have any special predictive powers. But one thing I do know is that people will still want some form of physical shopping experience. They won’t want to shop exclusively online.

They’ll still enjoy and want to visit interesting shops, touch and feel the goods, see them with their own eyes. While Covid-19 is still with us, and it could be for a long time yet, even the simple act of touching goods in a shop will be eyed with suspicion.

We will keep the rules around social distancing, for example a one in, one out, system, even a one-way system in the shops, for some time.

This decreases the joy, increases the frustration and changes habits that have been ingrained for many years. When will we next see the queues and rush to get through the doors for the huge January sales in the big shops?

Perhaps not for many years. Even those traditional sales however had started to diminish as retailers struggled to make pre-Christmas profits.

The infamous Black Friday sales imported from the US may even die a death, but who can forget the greed and sheer grit of people determined to grab the last flat screen TV by ripping it from another shopper’s arms as they fought to get the best bargains?

Perhaps pressing reset will allow businesses to reform and relaunch in different, more environmentally friendly ways that will help us all in the end.

Maybe the days of cheap throwaway clothing that barely lasts a season will be replaced by more sustainable, higher quality, longer lasting clothing. It could well be that our big brand high street stores will be places to test, try and assess the things we ultimately buy online.

If we restructure our town and city shops to be more accommodating of small businesses, bespoke stores that offer something no other town has, we could shift away from the current situation where many town centres are simply clones of each other offering up the same corporate brands.

Brighton is a great place for such bespoke businesses. We’ve many shops that are quirky and unique. It’s one of the best things about our city.

When shops reopen and lockdown ends, we must support these small businesses and try to ensure that not too many go under.

There will inevitably be casualties, we’ve already had some and there may be more. As consumers, we have choices that we constantly make.

The big budget brands and stores spend millions trying to affect the choices we make through advertising and the use of psychological “tricks”. Clearly, we are also driven by how much we earn and what income we have at our disposal and that profile, with many redundancies and job losses, will have changed a lot and will have a serious effect on our economy.

The road to recovery will not be a fast, open road that we travel quickly.

It will take time and things may not ever get back to where we were. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon the journey altogether in a search for what we previously perceived to be “normal”.

We need central and local government to choose the right road.

As citizens we need to make the right choices, not always the most selfish choices. As a society we need to focus more on kindness, help and understanding rather than intolerance and bigotry.

We must examine our values and our conscience to do what’s right for all, not just for the one.

We’ve heard it said by politicians, business leaders and others that we need to think not about going back to normal but move toward a new normality. We can, with effort, create a new normal that was better and more equal that the old normal. We have a once in a generation, if not once in a century opportunity to reset and recalibrate and do things for the good of society.