The Health Store winding down operations.

Gone into liquidation, it seems

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/provisional-liquidators-appointed-to-firms-operating-11-health-food-stores-1648294.html

On the other hand, we have Wendy's opening up. The overall health of the population might change a smidge…

They are overpriced but most of the time when purchasing from H&B, if you can time it right, you can get some sort of deal with big discounts.

They are closing because they are trapped into high rents, and they are too expensive. A lot of customers are buying aspirational products.. look at me, I'm doing really well.

That's retail these days. Retail changes constantly.

In the 80's catalogue shopping was 15% of UK retail sales.

You will have retail names disappear every year. You will have new retail names every year too.

Who thought 5 years ago that Jysk would have 20 or so shops here?

Just because one small group of overpriced specialist stores closes, does not mean the sector has issues.

It's reduced rate vat. Some items were previously 0% but became variable.

And likewise some items were previously 23% and had their rate dropped to 13.5%

They were in high rent locations and any drop in sales was going to hurt badly.

Blanchardstown store had a rent of 160,000 service charges of almost 20,000 and rates at similar level.

That's €4k a week before you pull up the shutters.