With lockdown restrictions continuing to gradually ease in the UK, retail executives are growing ever more confident that the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic will be short-lived.
Almost a quarter of all non-food retailers in May believed that significant disruption to their businesses would now last less than six months. That’s according to the latest statistics from the Deloitte Retail Industry Sentiment survey.
The figures highlight a marked improvement in retailer confidence compared with the previous week, which showed that only one in 20 non-food retailers felt the disruption would be over within six months.
The leap in confidence was even more marked among grocers, a full third of whom believed that the disruption due to COVID would be consigned to history in 4-6 months. Just a week previously, no grocery retailers surveyed felt that way.
Overall, though, more than three-quarters of non-food retailers in the survey were concerned that the industry will still take between six months and a year to fully recover. That’s even after the disruption of furloughed staff, closed stores and disrupted supply chains have been dealt with. That’s still better than in the previous survey, however, where non-food retailers felt the industry would not fully return to normal for up to two years.
Again, though, the food retail sector was more confident still: the latest results suggest it feels it could return to normal faster, with two-thirds of respondents reckoning that fully normal service could be resumed within three months.
And while food retailers are already now mostly reopened, that’s not the case in the non-food retail sector. Here, just under 60 per cent of businesses say they hope to reopen almost two-thirds of their retail estate capacity by the end of June. That’s just a couple of weeks after 15th June, when the UK government has said it will permit the reopening of a significant number of non-essential retail stores.
For the food retail sector, key priorities for the process of reopening following the easing of lockdown restrictions are the health and safety of their workforce, followed by supply chain management issues.
When it comes to non-food retail – possibly because operators in this sector have been faced with a longer period of shutdown – the priorities are slightly different. Worries over cash management are taking priority, but non-food retail firms are still concerned about the health and safety of their workforce as the next priority.
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