Comment: Another story lies behind falling footfall
Declining footfall in retail and leisure destinations continues to fuel near-death headlines in this post-pandemic environment that results in the high street and shopping centres continuing to suffer from a drumbeat of negativity.
Step back a bit though and you can find there are some positive trends that highlight how consumers are behaving very differently to before Covid-19 and that retail and leisure environments are healthier than the headlines would suggest.
CACI’s recent Shopping Dimensions report reveals some very interesting findings, most notably that a declining footfall is not translating into a declining overall spend. Since 2019 it has found that although the UK has suffered a footfall decline of 11.5% the amount spent has increased by a substantial 29%.
This equates to a spend coming in on average at a level 2.4-times that of a pre-pandemic trip. Part of the reason for this is that the ‘big day out’ is now a part of an increasing number of shoppers’ behaviour. They are visiting high streets, shopping centres and retail parks with an intention of spending across the triumvirate of retail, leisure and F&B (food and beverage).
This suggests destinations more than ever need to deliver a mix of tenants that cover all bases. Consumers are no longer visiting ‘shopping’ environments with the plan to fill their bags with physical goods, they are just as likely to be on a mission to fill their stomachs and to fill their phones with images of them involved in leisure activities. This certainly follows the ongoing mainstream trend of people choosing to spend their money on experiences rather than products.
Highlighting this phenomenon is recent research from Barclays, with its Consumer Spend data, which found annual spending on experiences such as entertainment and travel has risen 6.5% and 11.6% relatively year-on-year. This is certainly outpacing growth in non-essential spending more broadly that it calculates has risen by a much more modest 3.4%.
While landlords and retailers clearly have to consider how they sprinkle in more of the magic ‘experience’ dust into their businesses the other factor that has to be considered is the reduced frequency of visits that has driven the drop in footfall. CACI reckons this should be a focus of attention.
But even this should maybe not be a particular concern because it is being offset to some extent by the rise of deliveries, especially the quick-commerce variety that are being undertaken by the likes of Deliveroo and Just Eat in tie-ups with pretty much all the major grocers and a growing number of non-food players. The Co-op has found that as many 40% of its sales are now derived from this channel. It is very much a growing part of the retail market and the delivery providers all regard this as a sizeable area of growth now that they have largely saturated the restaurant delivery space.
Clearly we are in tough economic times and are living through a period of radically changed behaviour by the population, with work-from-home now a particularly notable feature, but there is no doubt that yet again the negative headlines that permeate the media do not tell anything like the whole or the true story.
