THE WEEK IN RETAIL ISSUE #51

EDITOR’S COMMENT

IS IT ALL SET TO END AS QUICKLY AS IT STARTED?

I must admit to being taken by surprise when First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced the other day that the Scottish Government would be accelerating its easing of Covid restrictions. After a year of her characteristically downbeat, cautious and doom-laden briefings, it was strange to hear Sturgeon suddenly change tack.

The cynic might argue that the forthcoming Scottish Parliament elections might have played a small part in her decision to start announcing some good news for a change, but whatever your view of her handling of an unfathomably complex task over the last 12 months, we can probably all agree that it’s good news that we seem to be pointing in the right direction for the first time in a very long while.

But where exactly are we pointing? The roadmap may be a little clearer and the markers along the way are in place – but where exactly is this freshly laid path taking us?

When the world opens up again – and it looks like it might happen as quickly as it closed down in the first place – what exactly will things look like from a retailer’s point of view?

What will consumers do when everything is open again? How have they been affected by the last year? Will there be a monster rush back to our ways of old, or will we emerge blinking and dazed into a world that’s largely unrecognisable?

In reality it’s likely to be somewhere in between those two polar extremes, but the world will have changed. So much has changed in the last year that we most certainly have another difficult year ahead of us. Only when consumers are free to do exactly as they choose will we start to understand exactly what they’re choosing to do.

What will happen to home delivery, online shopping, food-to-go and hospitality, to name a but a few of the biggest winners and losers of the Pandemic Stakes?

So a fresh start promises challenging, exciting times for local retailing, but it’s highly unlikely that it will bring much in the way of the clarity that our sector craves.

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