By Fraser McLuggage.

How often do you walk into a shop and see something that you would quite like to buy but take one look at the price and walk back out the door? UWS News visited two retail stores in Ayr from both ends of the price scale to see what high street shops had to offer.

The independent store, Unique, sells clothes, which are seen as ‘High End Fashion’. The store sells brands such as Adidas, Nike, Stone Island and Canada Goose at high prices, competing with larger retail companies such as JD Sports, Scotts and Tessuti.

These extravagant brands are not affordable to everyone in society. So what happens when you can’t afford to keep up with the trends? There is a lot of social pressure to keep up with modern trends and fashion, however the price of this is increasing and some items come at an unjustifiable cost.

Lewis Cochrane works in the store and he believes that some of the items of clothing on sale are massively overpriced. He said: “Some of it is just ridiculous, it is hard to justify that sometimes, paying for one item when you could be getting multiple things for the same price.”

On the other end of the scale, you have The British Heart Foundation is a charity shop, which relies mostly off of donations. These donations are then priced by the volunteers who work in the shop and sold, with proceeds going to The British Heart Foundation. There is still a high demand for charity shops on the high street and people look to shops like this to provide affordable support to the local community.

UWS spoke to the Assistant Manager in the Ayr branch, Martha Scott who said: “We get clothes with the tags still on them, we can get designer labels. The highest we would go for something is around £50, we’ve got price guides that we need to stick too.”