A fresh perspective on Jersey’s high street

Two of our newest Consumer Council members – both of whom are members of Beaulieu School’s sixth form – surveyed their fellow pupils about what shops they would like to see in Jersey for people their age.

By Georgia Beard and Martha McLaughlin

For many of the youth in Jersey, shopping on Jersey’s high street is often more underwhelming than exciting.

Shopping options for teenagers in the Island are extremely limited, and the prices are often out of reach for young consumers.

As Youth Representatives for the Jersey Consumer Council, we wanted to highlight this issue on behalf of our age group.

Jersey’s high street is filled with a high proportion of shops that target either an older demographic of consumers, or luxury buyers.

The majority of the shops in town cater to adults, and there is also a relatively smaller market for children’s clothing and toy shops. However, there is seemingly a gap in the market for teenagers.

As Jersey is a small Island, with limited activities for teenagers to do, shopping is often a social activity for us. However, even when teenagers find something they like, high prices make them unaffordable – especially as students are only earning minimum wage in Saturday jobs.

As a result, teenagers turn to online shopping, which has its drawbacks such as added shipping costs and delivery times.

There is also the big issue for us of not being able to try items on before buying them, which then leads to difficulties with returning items and paying an additional charge for shipping items back.

We conducted a survey with a sample of young people in our year group (aged 16 and 17), focusing on the choices of shops available on Jersey’s high street for our age range.

Our survey also focused on the affordability of the items available, and the shops that people our age would like to see introduced in Jersey.

The results showed widespread dissatisfaction. A staggering 96 per cent of the participants believed that Jersey does not have a sufficient choice of shops for our age group, while 77% said that prices were too high.

We also found that the lack of student discounts or youth price reduction schemes in many of the shops in Jersey contributes to the reasons why the young Islanders turn to online shopping, where these kinds of schemes are often in place.

We also surveyed what shops people our age would most like to see on the Jersey high street. There were a variety of answers, but the most common responses saw respondents name Zara, H&M and Primark as their desired retailers to have a presence on the Jersey high street for our demographic.

We believe that having such a limited number of shops in Jersey that are targeted towards the younger generation presents a missed opportunity to generate more revenue on the high street.

By securing a market presence of these kinds of key retailers that are targeted towards the younger generation, we are confident that Jersey’s high street would become more vibrant, with an increase in consumer spending in shops and cafés, helping to keep money circulating in the Island and reducing dependency on online or overseas purchases.

We also believe it would be a huge tour ism benefit, as travellers would become aware of known high street brands being available at VAT-free prices.

We also believe that, due to this untapped opportunity to cater for the younger generation, the incentives for young people to remain in the Island could be challenged.

The longer-term impact of such an oversight, which may seem insignificant now, could, we believe, be felt in the future by having a larger ageing population and little on-Island revenue to support the population.