What on earth are we to make of Poundland opening its 500th store right here in the heart of Birmingham city centre, Corporation Street?

It’s easy to mock the so-called discount chains, but the undoubted growth of the likes of Aldi, Lidl and others in recent years would indicate that they are fulfilling an important role on the High Street.

As Poundland chief executive Jim McCarthy said at the Birmingham launch – with VIP guest Jane Asher adding a touch of enduring glamour to proceedings – consumers are increasingly voting with their purses and wallets these days.

It has been an extremely tough last few years for the High Street, and there have been a number of casualties, from Woolworths to the likes of HMV, Blockbuster and Jessops. All were found wanting with their business models, with Woolies a classic example of a tired old formula which owed more to the distant 60s and 70s than the harsher 21st century zeitgeist.

Online trading has also played a merciless role in the culling of vulnerable chains, as savvy shoppers seek out the biggest bargains.

Couple that with the biggest squeeze on consumer spending in years – with wage rises either frozen or barely reaching inflation levels – and there’s a perfect storm still raging out there for many long-established traders struggling to stay afloat.

Poundland’s unrelenting growth to 500 stores proves the old American adage that nobody ever went broke by underestimating public taste. That might be slightly unfair to Poundland, and the service they provide, but it’s hardly likely to ruffle the feathers of a company who have carved an enduring niche for themselves more than 20 years after launching in Burton on Trent.

So that’s all right, then? Or is it? Whilst I don’t have a problem with Poundland pressing on towards their aim of 1,000 stores –ultimately the great British public decides these things rather than endlessly pontificating journalists – it’s still another nail in the coffin of individuality on the High Street.

Poundland’s unstoppable progress is another victory for corporate Britain, and all that that stands for. The age of individuality and personal choice, best represented by all those fishmongers, butchers, cheese shops etc which once were a familiar and welcoming sight to UK shoppers, is virtually over, never to return.

I have only to take a 10-minute stroll through the centre of my adopted home town, Tamworth, to realise, sadly, that the little man has all too often been forced to shut up shop and hand over the baton to the all-powerful supermarkets and other retail chains.

The centre of this historic Staffordshire town – which has a catchment area of well over 100,000 – is like something out of Clint Eastwood’s classic western High Plains Drifter, where the taciturn outlaw paints the town red and appoints the dwarf sheriff to exact his revenge on the corrupt town leaders. You half expect tumbleweed to drift past as you walk past Wilkinson’s or the Market Vaults pub.

The Clint Eastwood analogy may be slightly fanciful, but there’s nevertheless a grain of truth in the comparison. Around 20 or 30 years ago, Tamworth town centre was bustling, with an array of shops from fishmongers to butchers, hardware stores to pubs often packed to the rafters.

Tamworth is a slightly special case, in that the Ventura Park shopping complex just a quarter of a mile or so away has irrevocably distorted the trading equation, pulling in vast numbers of punters from the outlying West Midlands to sample the wares at the likes of Asda, Sainsbury’s, Marks and Spencer’s and now John Lewis at Home.

The trouble is that very few of those tens of thousands of shoppers ever bother to pick their way through the mounting tumbleweed on Market Street and Church Street.

The plight of Tamworth town centre is a chastening metaphor for much of modern Britain, where bland uniformity has replaced individuality and the personal touch, where the big boys rule and the little guys are either taken over or simply quit, where Gordon Gekko’s infamous ‘greed is good’ mantra has finally come to pass more than 25 years after Wall Street.

You see this in other walks of life. There’s a Big Four culture out there, from the supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons) through to accountancy (KPMG, PwC, Ernst and Young and Deloitte), the banks (Barclays, Lloyds, HSBC and RBS) to football (Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal).

Slowly but surely, decades of individual choice and independent trading are being wiped out and suffocated by the era of the dreaded ‘brand,’ with ubiquitous loyalty cards, two or three for one offers and the relentless corporate soft (and sometimes hard) sell.

It’s not so much Orwell’s nightmare vision in 1984, where Big Brother squeezed the life out of the population with jackbooted zeal as Huxley’s Brave New World, where society is slowly but surely lulled into a frightful uniformity of choice, a sort of sleepwalk through existence.

It would be madness – and utterly absurd – to pretend that supermarket chains, or any of the big corporates, are not vital components of our economy, creating jobs and pulling in the customers day after day.

But there’s another side to the story. If you don’t believe me, take a walk around Tamworth town centre, where the charity shops jostle with the remaining traders for business, and the bars and pubs are empty.

Meanwhile, over at Ventura Park, it’s often a struggle to get onto the car park as the supermarket bosses rub their hands in glee.