Retailers are like farmers. They are never really happy. Even in the good times, rents are too high, the weather too hot or staff too costly. But now they really have a reason to moan. The high street is staring into the abyss. This week about 20 chains — ranging from Oasis to Wyevale Garden Centres — were effectively put up for sale when Icelandic investment group Baugur filed for bankruptcy protection.

A relatively bustling Christmas already seems an aeon ago. Just to add to the misery, a day's trading will have been effectively wiped out this week by the snow. At Westfield, London's biggest shopping centre, only about half the shops managed to open and most of those were shut by lunch. The next great spending binge in the retail calendar is Valentine's Day, now little more than a week away. Beyond that lies a bleak landscape before further lifelines from Mother's Day and Easter. It is a certainty that some retailers will not be able to hold on that long.

Interest rate cuts will help a bit, although consumers, who are also nervous employees, are hoarding their cash, just in case. For every borrower who gains there are more savers who feel worse off because their income from investments has been hit.

The deep freeze in the property market does not help. One estimate suggests that each move generates an average of £4,000 of high street spending on the new home.

Britain's retail architecture is still essentially the product of a near 20-year boom that allowed consumers to accumulate almost £1.5 trillion of debt. Now the day of reckoning has arrived. Some experts predict that more than 400 major retailers could go down this year. A year that started with the death of Woolies is certain to be marked by a succession of retail wakes, leaving ever more high street sites in darkness.

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