The last five years have seen global and UK weather patterns start to change. What impact is this having on the retail industry?

1) Food prices: The US drought, the Russian heatwave and wet UK summer have all led to rising food commodity prices. Retailers face several difficult choices, chief among them whether they pass the full extent of the price rises on to consumers. There are also issues surrounding customer expectations. The bad harvest has produced more ‘ugly’ fruit and retailers including Sainsbury’s will be forced to relax their rules on fruit’s cosmetic appearance. It may be necessary to spend marketing budget on reassuring customers deformed potatoes are just as tasty as their attractive counterparts.

2) Delivery: Online fulfilment is another issue – even the seemingly untouchable Amazon has lost sales in the past because of unexpectedly heavy snow in the UK. If extreme weather events such as snow, flooding and storms continue to increase, delivery will get harder and more expensive

3) Footfall: The high street lives or dies according to the weather. If it’s sunny, more people go shopping – if it gets colder in autumn, more shoppers flock to buy warm clothes. Bad weather has serious implications for footfall figures and ultimately retailers’ bottom line, and freezing winters and wet summers are not good news.

4) Refrigeration: Higher temperatures will have an impact on stores. Guy Battle, head of the sustainability services practice at Deloitte, says summer temperatures used to peak at 28 or 29 degrees centigrade, but can now reach 35 degrees. This has implications for food refrigeration – more power will be needed to keep food cool on the hottest days.

5) Seasonal goods: Product ranges may have to change slightly. In the DIY sector, for instance, sales are heavily driven by the weather – if the summer is a washout, BBQs and garden furniture won’t sell. Retailers across the board may have to start looking at stocking more general year-round ranges and fewer seasonal products as the seasons get less predictable.

6) Fashion: Fashion sales in the UK are highly seasonal and dependent on temperatures. But if seasonal weather variations increase, sales are likely to suffer. Battle says: “In the UK we have very distinct seasons of fashion. Everything is geared up around the seasons. If they become less differentiated, what does that mean for the fashion industry?”

7) Agility: It will probably mean a more agile supply chain, so retailers are able to respond quickly to unexpected changes. Sourcing closer to home may help, and Zara-style vertical supply chains will become more popular. Lead times for clothes manufacturers will have to become shorter and perhaps a larger range of clothing stocked in stores all year. While there will still be some seasonality in the weather, it’s not as reliable as it was.

8) Sourcing: When floods hit Thailand just north of Bangkok last year, car manufacturer Toyota took a 15% hit on profits because most of their key suppliers were based there. Battle advises spreading risk by using different locations.

9) Online: If more shoppers choose to stay at home and shop online because of the weather, the use and design of some stores will change. Some grocery stores may need to be redesigned to make things easy for staff picking products for online orders, rather than having consumer shopping as their primary goal.

10) Forecasts: The biggest problem with the weather is uncertainty. Forecasts are not perfect, and there’s one thing climate scientists are sure of – the range of weather we experience is getting wider and more unpredictable. December 2010, for instance, was England’s second coldest and November 2011 the second warmest since records began in 1659. That said, the research surrounding climate change is developing quickly. In a couple of years’ time, we will know far more about what’s causing these fluctuations in weather and perhaps how to predict what’s coming.