Why every high street looks the same

Walk down the main shopping street of almost any city, or through almost any mall, and the view repeats. The same chain names over the doors. Inside, the same handful of colors, the same cut of trousers, the same jacket that was everywhere last month. In Britain the shopping street is called the high street, and the complaint that every high street looks alike has been around for years. Americans see the same thing on Main Street and in the mall.

It is not your imagination, and it is not an accident. This page explains the forces behind the sameness, what it does to the way you shop, and a simple plan for buying one good piece a season instead of the season itself.

Why chain stores converge

Fast fashion rewards safe bets

The business model at the center of the modern high street is fast fashion. In their overview of it, the operations researchers Felipe Caro and Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz describe it as offering fashionable clothes, or the perception of them, at affordable prices, through a highly responsive supply chain and an assortment that changes all the time. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimated in 2017 that clothing production had roughly doubled in the previous 15 years, and in wealthy countries it tied much of the rise to fast fashion: quicker turnaround of new styles, more collections a year and, often, lower prices.

When a chain must fill its stores with new lines every few weeks, the cheapest way to avoid unsold stock is to make what is already selling. A store that copies a proven look takes less risk than one that tries something new. When every chain follows the same logic, they arrive at the same racks.

Everyone reads the same signals

Trend cycles move together because the inputs are shared. Buyers watch the same runway seasons, the same sales data and the same social feeds. A look that is selling in one chain is visible to all the others within days, and the responsive supply chains that define fast fashion let them all react at once.

Rent picks the tenants

The busiest streets and the biggest malls charge the highest rents, and not every business can carry them. In a study of shopping mall leases, the economists Peter Pashigian and Eric Gould found that developers give well-known anchor stores large rent discounts because they draw shoppers in, and charge the smaller stores that benefit from that traffic a premium. Large chains with national budgets and predictable sales are the tenants landlords court. Independent shops are priced toward the side streets.

In 2005 the New Economics Foundation, a British think tank, surveyed 103 towns and classed 41 percent of them as “clone towns,” high streets so dominated by chains that they had lost their local identity. Clone towns also had fewer kinds of shops, and they tended to be dominated by a few categories, clothing among them.

One supply system serves most of them

Clothing today is often designed in one country, made in another and sold worldwide. Many chains draw on the same manufacturing regions, the same fabric types and the same trend information. Different labels, similar inputs, similar results.

What the sameness does to shoppers

When every window shows the same thing, two effects stack up.

The first is the bandwagon effect. The economist Harvey Leibenstein described it in 1950 as demand that rises simply because other people are buying. A look that fills every window seems to be what everyone is wearing, whether or not anyone you know is wearing it. Online, where sales counts and “trending” labels are visible, it can compound: in an experiment by Matthew Salganik and colleagues, showing people what others had chosen made popular items more popular and success harder to predict.

The second is the mere exposure effect. Robert Zajonc showed that people come to like things they have simply seen many times. Walk past the same color in five windows and it starts to look right. A month later, the clothes you already own, in last season’s colors, start to look slightly wrong. That is the Diderot effect at the scale of a whole wardrobe: the new standard is set by the street, not by any single purchase.

The result is a wardrobe that turns over faster than it wears out. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimated that the number of times a garment is worn before it stops being used fell by 36 percent in 15 years. Stores, for their part, are designed to keep you inside once you have stepped in, which is the Gruen effect.

How to buy one good piece instead of the season

1. List your gaps before the season starts. Look at what you actually wear. A gap is something you have wanted to wear several times in the last month and could not, because you do not own it or yours is worn out. Decision rule: if you cannot name the occasions you would wear it on, it is not a gap.
2. Do the three-window test. Walk past three different stores, or open three different sites, and note what all of them are selling. That is the season. Decision rule: anything in all three windows is a trend until proven otherwise. Ask whether you would have wanted it two years ago.
3. Choose one piece for one gap. Look at fabric, seams and fit, not the display around it. Decision rule: it must go with at least three things you already own. A personal uniform makes this check quick.
4. Leave the styling behind. The piece will be shown with matching trousers, shoes and a bag. Buy the piece. The complete-the-look trap explains how those outfits are built to grow your basket.
5. Count its wears at the end of the season. If it was worn often, you chose well. Cost per wear shows how to judge it.

Variations

• Secondhand and vintage. Buying used takes you out of the season entirely. Use the same gap list.
• Independent shops. Often pricier, often worth it for a piece you will wear for years. Same three-thing rule.
• On a tight budget. The chain may be the only option, and that is fine. Choose the plainest version of the piece you need, which will look right for longer than the trend version.

What goes wrong, and the fix

• Buying the trend in basics. Five T-shirts in this season’s color are still the season. Fix: basics in colors you have worn for years.
• The end-of-season sale. Half price on something you passed over at full price is still something you passed over. Fix: the gap list applies at sale time too.
• “Timeless” as a label. Stores use it for this season’s take on a classic. Fix: the two-years-ago question.