Averting the High Street retail crash

Hermes, one of the UK's largest landlords, is offering existing tenants the option of paying rent monthly rather than quarterly. How nice of them, there is of course a surcharge of between 0.5% and 1% to ease Hermes' cash flow. Will this be enough to stave off the demise of retail in the UK? I think not, as I wrote on Friday - "Many retail companies are just holding position and hoping for a good Christmas, when that does not come true there will be big losses, company failures and huge job losses. I expect to see many high streets and shopping malls with over 15% empty units by the end of 2009 Q2."