The most commonly found shops on any High Street these days are charity shops, pawnbrokers and money lenders, coffee shops and of course betting shops.
However, there has been a very noticeable shift recently regarding the way that punters much prefer placing their bets, with a huge percentage of them now opting to bet via their mobile devices.
In fact, it has been suggested that 75% of punters have adopted and embraced mobile betting along with online betting too, and that with the soon to be reductions in the stake levels that players can play FOBT’s in bookies betting shops could be the final nail in the betting shop coffin, so to speak.
It has been FOBT’s that have been the lifeblood of betting shops for well over a decade, however that isn’t going to be the case for very much longer, and it is hard to see how any betting company is going to be able to replace the income lost via those machines.
Large numbers of betting shop closures and staff redundancies are looming, and whilst there will still be betting shops around after the stake levels are reduced on FOBT’s some industry insiders are saying that as many of 50% of them could close, if not more.
Time will tell if the operators of betting shops in the UK are able to dream up some weird and wonderful new way to get punters flocking to their betting shops, however it is hard to see what they could replace their FOBT’s with that would generate the same high income streams.
