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The Retail Landscape
The Death Or Rebirth Of Retail? Right: Retail has definitely changed a bit since the Ladybird Shopping with Mother book was published. Below: Michael Weedon has spent the last three decades tracking and commenting on the retail scene.
Household retail names are disappearing, online sales soaring and running costs for indies escalating, yet we are still spending £1 billion every day in the UK’s half a million shops, the population of shoppers is growing at a rapid rate, shop openings are almost keeping pace with closures, with all these highs and lows it is difficult to get an accurate reading of the UK’s retail landscape. Retail commentator Michael Weedon, managing director of Exp2, summarises an insightful presentation he gave at the recent London Stationery Show on the realities of the High Street. This year has produced a flood of shocking news headlines featuring household name retailers, with administrations at Toys’R’Us, Maplin and MultiYork, widespread store closures by New Look, Carpetright and Moss Bros, and contractions announced in the estates of House of Fraser, Debenhams and Marks & Spencer. Adding to the bad news from product retailers has come a slew of announcements of further branch closures by several big banks. More than 20,000 jobs are estimated to be in danger within just this group of businesses. So, is it game over for the High Street? A more relevant question is whether this is actually different from any other spring. Human beings are attuned to threats in our environment. We find it easier to identify what might be trends with well-known fascias than we do when we think about a large numbers of small things, like independent
shops. It doesn’t help that the big picture is not readily available to most of us anyway. Either way, we find it difficult to see the context within which these headline events occur. But context is key. For a start, there are about half a million retail units in Britain. Each year roughly one in ten of the businesses in these areas shuts up shop. Almost all of those are replaced quickly with a bright, optimistic new outfit. Half a million of anything is a difficult number to visualise. If one person from every shop was given a ticket to Wembley Stadium you would need five and a half Wembleys to seat them. Not helpful? OK, if you gave a ticket for one person to each of the shops that closed in 2017 and one to each that opened they wouldn’t quite fit in to one Wembley. The thing to bear in mind is that huge changes occur every year and what makes the difference to the high street is the gap between openings and closures. In 2017, about 5,000 shops closed net which is only slightly more (1%) than the shops that opened. This closeness in the opening/closing relations has Above: Shop vacancy rates are no where near as bad as they have been. Left: Maplins’ demise is one of many chains to close down.
paused the long-term downward trend in shop vacancy. In 2011, when we had 14.6% of shops empty - equating to an astonishing one in seven shops - the government was panicked into action, appointing Mary Portas to report on solutions to the problem of “the failing high street”. The latest figures from the Local Data Company suggest that after several years of improvement, roughly one in nine units remains shuttered - one in eight retail outlets and one in 12 leisure units. Whether this pause is the prelude to further falls or the beginning of a new upswing remains to be seen. So, is this about retail turnover? Not according to the ONS, which publishes a fascinating series of figures for sales. Its monthly retail sales release actually talks about retail volume (how many things sold), but most of the retailers I know just talk about what’s in the till. Last year we, the Great British Public, spent just over £365 billion PROGRESSIVE GREETINGS WORLDWIDE
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