Shock of Queen's death impacts retail footfall

It looks like UK retail footfall was impacted by the news of the Queen’s death last week with the latest figures from the Ipsos Retail Traffic Index showing an 11.6% week-on-week drop.

In some cases footfall would have been affected by store closures late on Thursday and on Friday with Selfridges, Liberty and French Connection all staying shut for a day. Many consumers, meanwhile, weren’t in a physical shopping mood and stayed glued to their TV sets on Thursday, Friday and at the weekend.

Footfall was also down 14.6% compared to 2019 in the non-food sector. But towns outperformed cities by 5.3% points compared to the pre-pandemic period.

The best performing region was South West England & Wales where store visits were down by ‘only’ 8.8%.

However, it’s those week-on-week figures that are most interesting and on that basis, footfall — which had been recovering in the UK’s city centres — fell as much as 7.8% in cities. And towns dropped a hefty 11.8% compared to the previous week.

High streets remained down 14.6% against three years ago but also fell 10.5% against the previous week. For retail parks those figures were -10.8% and -12.6% and for shopping centres they were -16.4% and -9.7%.

As mentioned, South West England & Wales did relatively well, but Scotland & Northern Ireland plummeted 18.5% against three years ago and 11% against the previous week.

For London and the South East, the falls were 17.2% and 12.7%.

Shock of Queen's death impacts retail footfall - Ipsos

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