Since the government announced June 15 as the date from when non-essential retailers can look to reopen stores, many retailers are now wondering if they can operate stores profitably in an era of social distancing. Industry experts give their views.

Gary Grant

Gary Grant, chief executive, The Entertainer

When stores reopen on June 15, we will see a change in the way people shop. They won’t want to go into stores unnecessarily, so we will see less browsing and more shopping with a purpose, which will equal a higher conversion rate.

Although we will have to keep people outside, we’ve set up a ‘ready in 10 minutes’ scheme, where customers can order products on the website while standing in the queue, and its effectively a fast click and collect service. We will also have a staff member at the doors managing the queue, and if people know exactly what they want, we will have a fast-track process in place.

Our objective is to satisfy all of our customers to achieve all they want in the fastest possible time that we can serve them. Having the fast-track will actually allow us to serve more people an hour than we would ordinarily be restricted to with social distancing measures and saves customers from having to wander around the store.

As long as retailers pace their customers well and get them in and out as quickly as possible in a non-pressured way, there’s no reason why they can’t continue to prosper.

Stephen Springham

Stephen Springham, head of retail research, Knight Frank

It’s going to be a struggle, there’s no getting away from it. If you look at the essential retailers that have traded through the lockdown, the food stores are one thing, but the likes of the pharmacy and health and beauty retailers are definitely not trading at anything like what they were pre-coronavirus. Boots is trading at something like 75%, yet they are an essential retailer.

That’s the proof in the pudding, or at least the benchmark, for non-essential retailers as they begin to open in the coming weeks. It’s going to be tough to get anything like the trade volumes to make it worthwhile and make money out of it. It’s going to be very tough for a long time. The general consensus seems to be that sales volumes won’t return to anything resembling normality until the second half of 2021.

Many national retailers are feeling apprehensive around reopening and it’s going to be very much a case of looking at phased reopenings. The notion that everything is going to reopen on June 15 really isn’t going to happen, it’s going to be more staggered than that.

Radojev, Hugh

Hugh Radojev, senior reporter, Retail Week

Operating stores profitably, particularly in the first few weeks and months after reopening with social distancing, is going to be difficult.

In terms of the logistics, retailers are going to be needing to pay staff at pre-coronavirus rates, while spending extra on the various new hygiene and safety requirements that will be needed, not to mention restocking currently dormant stores.

They also simply won’t be getting as many people through the doors in a normal trading day as they would have done pre-coronavirus, with limits to the number of people being allowed inside stores at any one time.

Ultimately, it will come down to consumer demand. Data I’ve seen from international retailers with stores in Germany, for example, showed that in the week after reopening post-coronavirus, sales were 90% lower than what they had been previously.

In a recent survey conducted with Walnut Unlimited, we found less than half of consumers would want to go into a non-essential retail store. It seems shopping for things like food is one thing, but many people simply aren’t going to want to risk exposing themselves to the virus to buy a new pair of shoes or a T-shirt.

Also for many retailers, particularly those operating store in city centres, there is unlikely to be any real increase in tourist trade this year and no real idea when office workers will begin returning in meaningful numbers.