It wasn’t hard to spot who’s winning and who’s losing on a retail park visit last week

Being a non-motorist who lives close to the centre of London, I don’t spend enough time visiting retail parks (with the exception being my local one, the Effra Road retail park in Brixton, but as that only contains two shops - a Currys and a Halfords - that doesn’t really count). But my visit to Sainsbury’s in Crayford last Thursday provided an opportunity to visit Tower Retail Park across the road while I was there.

There’s nothing special about the park, which looked as drab as retail parks tend to do in the rain on a Thursday morning, but the car park, which looked a bit small for the size of the scheme, was encouragingly busy at 915am. My excitement about that was tempered slightly when someone told me most of the cars would have belonged to staff working in the shops, but nevertheless, there were a decent number of shoppers around for the time of day.

What was really striking was the contrast between the winners and the losers. I didn’t have time to go in all the stores, but two of last year’s private equity sensations, Pets at Home and Hobbycraft, were doing good business for the time of day. The stores couldn’t have been more different. Pets looked really inviting, well merchandised, and with lots of customer interaction with both the staff and the small animals. The vets surgery inside the store seemed to work well as a driver of footfall.

Hobbycraft by contrast was a mystery to me. Next to zero spent on shopfitting, and an eclectic mix of stock, from knitting patterns to Hornby trainsets. Oddly the Scalextrix and Hornby was mostly kept in locked glass cabinets, which was a bit of a surprise, although I suppose they’re relative high value compared to the tissue paper and wool which makes up most of the assortment. It might seem a weird place to me, but there were people in there shopping at 915am and they clearly really liked what was on offer, which is a range which is low-priced but keeps people occupied in these austere times.

The other stores I went in were the Currys/PC World joint store, and Comet. Now it was early in the day admittedly, but neither had any customers. The Dixons store had the benefit of a recent refurb and the ground floor, including the new Knowhow service proposition, looked really sleek, but I didn’t like the mezzanine where the white goods lived, where the low hanging lighting created a cavernous and gloomy feel.

The Comet store was much lighter and was an inviting environment - it was the only store on the park which had escalators up to the mezzanine - but it had the feel of a retailer which wasn’t trading well. Every fixture had POS shouting SALE on it, while this extraordinary leaflet really confused me. I’d hate to be selling electricals at the moment, the margins are miniscule in the first place but internet and supermarket competition is really hurting and seeing these adjacent Dixons and Comet stores really brought home what a dog-eat-dog market this is right now.

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