Retail On The Ropes, Four Ways It Can Come Out Fighting

Whichever way one looks at it, it's been a turbulent week for retail. Store closures and job losses at John Lewis and Boots, allegations, which just don't seem to go away, of modern slavery at Boohoo's Leicester factories, and warnings from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) of price hikes in the event of a no deal Brexit.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the sector is unlikely to ever recover from the blows it's been taking, such is the enormity of some of the changes which we are witnessing.

And adding to the pressure on physical stores, it appears that we're all preferring to shop online now. Perhaps no surprise, but it's a rapidly growing trend which cannot be ignored. According to the latest Online Retail Index from IMRG and Capgemini, overall online retail sales in June surged 33.9 per cent year-on-year – a new 12-year high since March 2008.

According to the report, "Home delivery has become the norm, returns windows have been stretched, and click & collect options for non-essential products have largely been abandoned as a result of temporary shop closures".

So does this spell the end for physical retail? Is the entire concept of walking into a shop to purchase items, rapidly becoming a thing of the past? Certainly the pandemic has changed our shopping behavior, and the answers will ultimately be found in identifying what of our new behavior is ephemeral and what will become permanent.

But that's unlikely to become clear anytime soon. For example, in a recent poll, the majority of people said that they would shop the same if wearing a face covering was made mandatory and only 2% said they would shop more. But if cases increase, as they have in many U.S. states and notably in Melbourne, Australia, those numbers could change, reflecting the fact that our behavior is still being formed.

Psychologists say that it takes, on average, sixty six days for new behaviors to become formed, to be embedded. But we are not facing a static scenario, the ground is shifting all the time, hence why it is so difficult to make predictions on our shopping habits.

However, there are steps that can be taken to entice us back into shops. Here's just four:

Safe And Secure

As we now have become very aware of, the environment needs to be made safe and secure. And above all, we need to feel safe when we enter a store. Social distancing has become embedded but only in certain scenarios such as queuing to enter. Hand sanitizer has become the norm and of course, one of the great benefits of all this is that premises are so much cleaner than before.

And it's set to get a whole lot better. I wrote about the benefits of ultra violet light at a particular density in my Forbes article yesterday and the commercial application of this by disinfecting the air will undoubtedly pave the way for us all to return to some kind of normality.

Permission To Experiment

I recently spoke with Jace Tyrrell, chief executive of the New West End Company, which represents the interests of retail businesses in London's West End. And he described a scenario where, as a direct result of the virus, councils are now being given "permission to experiment" as he put it.

And it seems that that is already translating into action on the ground in where many areas are now being either fully pedestrianised or space for cyclists and pedestrians is increasing.

And all this of course means that retailers and hospitality are able to use that space to greater effect. It might be the summer and winter could be a different matter but here's hoping that the outdoor cafe culture so common on our holidays abroad, becomes a thing in towns up and down the country.

Inspiration

It's something which for years has been discussed and indeed of late, more and more examples of physical retail inspiring and exciting us have become apparent. But this trend must now be accelerated at pace. Because, more than ever before, we need a reason to enter a store.

Anxious, cautious customers are not going to dwell and browse in the way that we once did with the fear of the virus hanging in the air. So more imaginative ways, using outdoor space to better use must quickly be found.

Change The Model - Go Green

Institutional, remote landlords, local councils with little or no experience or knowledge, apathetic local communities and a lack of any appetite for real change. That, together with central government which even this week, again failed to acknowledge even the presence of retail in our lives, have blighted our high streets for years.

Added to which, the large chains, for decades cloned high streets up and down the country, giving them all a somewhat sterile, impersonal look and feel. In his recent report, former Tesco executive and former chief executive of Iceland and Wickes, Bill Grimsey, lamented the fact that, "It’s a bitter pill to swallow when you realise that what you spent your whole life building now needs to be unpicked in order to build back a better place".

But one thing the COVID-19 pandemic has provided us with is an opportunity to do exactly that, to unpick all that work, to reshape and re-imagine our town centers into being more pleasant, attractive and therefore greener places to be.

It's the opportunity of a life time, we must not squander it.