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THE WEEK IN RETAIL ISSUE 31
EDITOR’S COMMENT
MIXED MESSAGING ADDS TO FESTIVE UNCERTAINTY
A second wave of Covid-19 has seemed inevitable for a long time now and it increasingly looks like things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get any better. If anything, the uncertainty that has plagued the entire retailing supply chain over the last seven or eight months only seems to be growing. Planning any further ahead than about a fortnight at the moment seems like an act of folly, even if we all remain wedded to the idea that we somehow need to create some sort of plan for the future.
At 6pm on Friday this week, some 11 Council areas in west and central Scotland will enter Tier 4 of Scotland’s unique 5-tier Covid-19 restrictions model. In other words, full-on lockdown. With First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement still ringing in our ears, it was bizarre then to discover that UK government Ministers are currently discussing how they could relax restrictions, if even for just a few days, to allow people to celebrate Christmas with their families.
The prospect of Christmas with family is obviously highly appealing for most of us, but the already significant risk of mixed messaging causing mass confusion among the Great British public has ratcheted up another notch or three. I don’t propose to get into a moral debate about coronavirus restrictions, but I would suggest that mixed messaging only makes the ultimate and much bigger task – ensuring widescale adherence to the rules for as long as it takes – that bit more difficult.
Broadly speaking and purely from my own experience, a lot of people have been losing faith in the strategies adopted by the various governments across the UK and many simply can’t see the logic behind a lot of the more recent decisions made by Johnson, Sturgeon and co.
Our leaders are at risk of entirely losing the dressing room here and you don’t need to be Jose Mourinho to know what happens in that situation.
