A FEW weeks back, my working day ended with a meeting in West Bridgford. It dragged on until 6.30pm, so I decided to dive into the shops and buy an evening meal before I went home.

It was an easy thing to do. There was no traffic to dodge because I was walking through a pleasant pedestrianised area and there was an M&S Simply Food at the end of it.

What struck me about my walk was the sheer range and quality of the shops, cafes and restaurants on Bridgford's main drag. Why would I need to go anywhere else?

Retailers themselves clearly don't. With one of the wealthiest catchments in Notts, it was no surprise to see a survey suggest that this middle-class enclave has the lowest level of empty shops in the whole of the East Midlands.

What was surprising – well, shocking actually – was that the same survey suggested that nearly one-third of the shops in another substantial location only two miles away were apparently standing empty.

That substantial location is Nottingham city centre.

There was widespread disbelief at the Local Data Company's report on empty shops, suggesting Nottingham had the second-highest retail vacancy rate in the country at nearly 30 per cent.

I don't doubt for a moment that LDC's figure is, in fact, accurate. It possesses photographs of all the empty shops which will probably prove its point. The issue is where those photographs were taken.

We may think that Shoppingham as we know it is a compact destination bookended by Maid Marian Way in the west and Hockley in the East, the Victoria Centre in the north and Broadmarsh in the south.

The Local Data Company doesn't. Its version of the city centre includes such well-known retail stamping grounds as Canning Circus, Carlton Hill and, er, Nottingham Railway Station

I don't think I'm taking too much of a leap to suggest Harvey Nichols may not be opening a branch in any of those locations anytime soon.

Just to complicate matters further, LDC's researchers took their snaps of empty shops in November, just when Westfield (remember them?) had cleared out large chunks of Broadmarsh before its now-abandoned redevelopment. They still counted all these shops as empty – even though their closure had nothing to do with the retail health of Nottingham.

Are we, then, in the territory of lies, damned lies and statistics? I certainly don't think that LDC's survey presents an accurate impression of the health of the retail economy in Nottingham. For one thing, its survey work was done only six months after CACI, another consultancy, suggested Nottingham was the fifth biggest retail destination in the UK outside London, with £1.7 billion a year spent in its shops.

And two other surveys of retail vacancies in Nottingham suggested the figure actually is between 11 and 17 per cent.

For a city centre of Nottingham's size and scope to have seen such a sudden and dramatic decline in the number of shops would suggest a localised economic shock which simply hasn't happened. So the headline vacancy rate in LDC's report about Nottingham doesn't ring true.

So, we can safely afford to dismiss their survey out of hand, right? Wrong.

There is a sea-change taking place in retail and it was flagged up well before LDC's survey landed. Mary "Queen of Shops" Portas produced a report last year about our high streets which suggested that trying to reinvent a past dominated by butchers, bakers and scented candlestick makers would be like trying to roll a boulder uphill.

We lead busier lives than we used to, and shoppers are no longer inclined to wander from shop to shop when they can get everything more cheaply and quickly in a supermarket.

The future for retail is one where much of the most hassled shopping is done over the internet. The future for Shoppingham depends on delivering an experience – one where quality shops offer great service and things you can't do online, cafés give you somewhere to graze and check out offers on your smartphone, events which you want to see.

The future for areas where there are substantial retail vacancies doesn't lie in trying to preserve them as retail zones. Trying to turn back the clock will simply prolong the agony.

Wherever they lie, if 30 per cent of shops really are empty then don't try to keep them all as shops. As the late, great Apple founder Steve Jobs once said, Think Different.