UK weekly footfall shows retail still not back to normal

By

Nigel TAYLOR

Published
Mar 15, 2022

Life in the UK may seem to be back to normal, but retail is still far from business-as-usual. The latest retail footfall figures from the Ipsos Retail Traffic Index showed that the week to March 13’s non-food footfall was down 18.8% compared to the same week in 2019. But on the plus side, it was up 1.2% compared to the previous week.

City centres remained weak with towns outperforming cities by 5.9 percentage points. In fact, cities were down 23.5% compared to the pre-pandemic period, even though they were up 2.4% against the week earlier.

As usual, retail parks outperformed other destination types when doing a straight pre-Covid comparison, although they lagged on a week-on-week basis. They had only a 13.4% pre-pandemic deficit, while they also endured  a 0.7% week-on-week drop. Meanwhile high streets were down 21.4% and up 1.8% on the same basis and shopping centres were down 21.7% and up 1%.

The figures are particularly useful because they cover non-food footfall specifically and actually count the number of shoppers entering stores rather than just visiting the wider destinations.