High Street closures mount; The myth of working from home; Perils of macho culture

1 High Street closures mount (Simon Neville in The Guardian) High street store closures increased tenfold last year. A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Local Data Company showed the net number of store closures was 1,779 in 2012 – up from 174 in 2011. It added that the number of stores closed by retail chains could double this year from 14 stores a day in 2011 to 28 a day in 2013, after HMV, Blockbuster and Jessops collapsed.

The report found that payday loan stores and pound shops are the fastest-growing retailers on the high street, with card shops, computer game and health food stores the most depleted. Payday loan firms increased their high street presence by 20%, pawnbrokers were up 13%, and nearly two pound shops were opened every week across the country.

Mike Jervis, insolvency partner and retail specialist at PwC, said: "2012 saw more retail chains go into insolvency than ever before. The failed chains generally shared two problems – too many stores and too little multichannel activity." Card shops suffered a net fall of 188 stores, a 23% drop, while the failure of Game contributed to a 45% fall in high street computer game stores.

The survey, which measured data from 500 towns and cities, also found that the number of store closures outstripped the number of store openings in every region of the country.

2 The myth of working from home (Margaret Ryan on BBC) Yahoo has banned its staff from "remote" working. After years of many predicting working from home as the future for everybody, why is it not the norm? The move to get staff back into the office from June this year is thought to have been driven by new chief executive Marissa Mayer, who herself returned to work weeks after giving birth.

Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson, who spends much of his time working on Necker Island in the Caribbean, was quick to respond, calling it a "backwards step in an age when remote working is easier and more effective than ever". People in the West are constantly bombarded by news about technology that makes it easier to communicate with the office. Many have fast broadband and webcams that allow their faces to appear through the ether at any important meetings. They are surrounded by smartphones, laptops and tablets. 

Everything is surely there to free them from the daily commute. Those in manufacturing or retail might always have to be present, but in an age when so many work in offices, why can't they have their office space at home?

Yahoo is not a lone voice in espousing the virtues of physically being in the office. Only last week Google’s chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said when the company is asked how many people telecommute, their answer is "as few as possible". "There is something magical about sharing meals," Pichette explained. "There is something magical about spending the time together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer 'What do you think of this?'"

There are obvious reasons why working from home has not proliferated in the way people thought it might. There is still ingrained cultural antipathy.

3 Perils of macho culture (Jonathan Jansen in Johannesburg Times) To change the epidemic of rape in South Africa, we need to change the culture that produces these kinds of men in this kind of society. It starts with how we raise our boys. Take, for example, the socialisation of the rugby boy. The youngster is taught aggression from early on, and encouraged to be physical in his encounter with the opposition. As some competitive bodies are pumped with steroids, physical fights are common - even deadly ones.

Then there is the home, where the son observes how his father treats women, including his wife. The physical abuse of women is common in many South African families. Wherever I have worked, I would see the head of a colleague drop as I asked how she came to have those facial bruises. This is not only a disease of the working classes and the poor - wife-beating is a classless sport. 

It is in these everyday practices of what men do, and are allowed to do, that we establish in our culture the kinds of gender relations that sometimes explode into the terror of rape. We need to do things differently. First, teach your boy to cry from an early age. Learning to express emotion in a safe and positive way, rather than through aggression and retaliation, goes a long way to healing the woundedness of men in our society. 

Second, model as men the alternate behaviour, especially in a crisis. In the almost 50 years that I knew my father, I can honestly say I did not hear him - ever - raise his voice towards my mother. That, I know, had an enormous influence over my life. Third, speak the language of love. Tell your children you love them. Fourth, reprimand bad male behaviour in public so your children know there is right and wrong.