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A growing number of UK businesses are either collapsing, closing branches, or entering administration. When the pattern is examined carefully, most are connected with discretionary spending rather than essentials.

Recent examples include the restaurant chain Spaghetti House, which closed all of its branches and made over 100 staff redundant.

Retailers are also under pressure. Shoe Zone has closed stores after losses increased sharply. The former WH Smith high street chain, now renamed TG Jones, is facing possible insolvency and major store closures.

Hospitality is one of the worst affected sectors. Government and industry data show thousands of pubs, restaurants, hotels and food-service businesses becoming insolvent.

The pattern is revealing.

Most of the sectors under greatest strain are not directly connected with survival needs. They are businesses that depend upon surplus income – eating out, leisure shopping, fashion purchases, travel, hospitality, entertainment and tourism.

Consumer spending figures support this. UK households are cutting back mainly on non-essential expenditure, particularly travel and leisure.

This is highly significant in relation to the shrinking economy.

As energy costs rise through the whole economy, and as governments, businesses and households all struggle with debt and inflation, people naturally retreat towards essentials. Food, heating, housing and basic transport take priority. Discretionary spending declines first because it depends upon surplus prosperity.

The industrial-consumerist era created vast layers of discretionary activity. Much of modern employment has depended upon people having enough surplus income to spend on optional goods and services. Once that surplus begins to disappear, these sectors become unstable.

The insolvency figures increasingly reflect this reality. Retail, hospitality and leisure businesses are consistently among the most vulnerable sectors.

From the viewpoint of localism, this may represent the early stages of a long transition away from a consumption-driven economy toward a more essentials-based economy.

In a localist future, economic activity becomes increasingly focused upon necessities close to home – food growing, maintenance, care, repair work, local materials, practical crafts, shared facilities and small-scale production. These are activities rooted in survival and locality rather than discretionary consumption.

The present wave of closures may therefore not simply be a temporary recessionary cycle. It may instead be showing which parts of the industrial economy are least sustainable when surplus energy and surplus spending begin to decline.

That does not mean all hospitality, retail or leisure disappears. Some will survive locally at smaller scale, especially where closely tied to community life. But the era of mass discretionary consumerism appears increasingly fragile.

The economy may gradually divide into two parts:

• essential activities that remain viable because people must have them
• discretionary activities that contract because people can no longer afford large amounts of optional consumption

This distinction may become one of the defining economic realities of the coming decades.