Will the proposed devolution of Sunday trading hours to local authorities put a knife through the heart of convenience retailing?

While we’ve all been noting the seemingly unstoppable rise of the convenience store, could it be that things are about to change once more thanks to the devolution of Sunday trading laws?

Think of it this way. The underlying assumption behind convenience retailing is that shoppers can get things that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to when other shops are closed. At no point in the week is this more the case than on a Sunday.

To an extent, convenience retailers have benefitted from the fact that they can offer top-up products that might not be available elsewhere at certain times, and we have all taken to shopping in these stores as a matter of course.

However, extending the Sunday trading hours changes this dynamic once more. Shoppers will now be able to frequent large supermarkets at times when formerly they might not have been able to do so.

Part of the raison d’être of convenience shopping disappears at this point and the focus therefore switches to range width rather than the availability of a limited offer of more ‘essential’ products.

Larger footprint

Follow this line of thinking and bigger stores on the high street become the next stage in making this happen. Rather than getting smaller, high street convenience stores will become medium size supermarkets and stores will have larger floorplates.

That, in a rather outsize nutshell, is the theory for what is to come in the grocery sector, as put forward quietly last week by a senior manager from one of the big four supermarkets.

There is, of course, a counter-argument that most convenience stores are busy throughout the week and at times when the big supermarkets are open by dint of the fact that they tend to be just around the corner.

It is quite hard however, not to discern a grain a truth about the extended hours theory and to think that we may be on the verge of seeing many more large food retail units springing up, just when we thought they were on the way out.

All of which may seem some way off, but one of the things that enables any retailer to succeed is the ability to predict what is coming next.

Bigger food stores may cost more to maintain, but this could be the coming thing for the supermarkets. Watch this (larger) space.