Britain’s summer so far has been, at best, bleak. In fact, the MET office has announced that this is expected to be the wettest July on record, following months of drought and hosepipe bans across the British Isles. However, it is not only the tans of the public that are suffering this year – retail commercial properties have, thus far, failed to hit targets across the board, and many are blaming the daily downpours for the lack of consumer interest in their products.
However, there could be a secret silver lining for consumers in all this doom and gloom, as retail commercial properties are now going to greater and greater lengths to tempt shoppers out from their warm, dry homes in search of a bargain.
Over the past weekend, it was revealed that nine out of ten clothing chain commercial properties were holding sales and massively slashing prices in a bid to boost sales figures for the month. Many went to great lengths to coax resistant shoppers back to their high street and shopping centre commercial properties, with the average discount coming in at 55 per cent and some even cutting prices by as much as 75 per cent.
According to chartered accountants PriceWaterhouseCooper, average savings of 55 per cent are unheard of in July, usually a boom month for retail commercial properties. The mass price cutting created savings of £300 million in total, ensuring that many consumers gained a great bargain as a reward for venturing out into the rain.
Yet even these record breaking sales may prove to be too little to entice shoppers into retail commercial properties. According to Experian Footfall, which studies consumer behaviour, revealed that the number of shoppers hitting the high street dropped by a staggering 16 per cent when compared to the previous year on the wettest day last month, Thursday June 28th.
Additionally, Experian calculated that the number of people shopping in June overall fell by 1.6 per cent from 2011, with retail commercial properties suffering accordingly. Yet it cannot purely be blamed on the weather alone, as a number of factors have contributed to consumers abandoning the high streets for different distractions.
Wimbledon, the Jubilee weekend and the Euro 2012 football matches all coincided with dips in sales, presumably because people chose to remain in their homes to watch the events, or attend street parties in the case of the Diamond Jubilee, rather than visiting retail commercial properties. This, understandably, is causing retailers some concern, with one of the biggest international sporting events due to kick off in London in only a few weeks’ time.
Yet still, the weather has played a huge factor in retail commercial properties’ woes, according to Richard Dodd of the British Retail Consortium.
He said; “Retailers need the appropriate weather for a particular time of year and they want warm, sunny weather now in order to sell things like summer fashions, outdoor leisure items like garden furniture and barbecues.
“The poor weather that we have been experiencing recently means that many traditional big-selling summer items have just not been selling well at all.
“There is now a danger that autumn stock is going to have to do battle with unsold summer stock on the high street.”
Do you believe that poor weather correlates to failing sales in high street retail commercial properties? Or do you believe that events such as Wimbledon, the Diamond Jubilee and Euro 2102 play a larger role than the researchers have indicated?
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