Back in March I wrote on Retail Week that coronavirus would bring a tipping point: a permanent change in industry structure. At the time some readers wondered whether I might be hyperbolising. It turns out I hardly knew the half of it.

Now that it’s clear the crisis will continue for at least six more months, or maybe beyond next year, even a ‘new normal’ looks hopeful. We should get used to the new weird.

Essentially, we are seeing a redefinition of time and place. To illustrate this, try drawing three pie charts: how did you spend your waking hours last year and now, and how do you think it will be by 2022?

Split your time into six places: home, work/school, retail, eating out, leisure and travel. For the moment ‘home’ has grown massively and the other five have shrunk and changed beyond recognition. 

The biggest change of course is work. Before lockdown, half a million people commuted into the City of London and Canary Wharf each working day: the number is now around a 10th of that. In the UK’s largest cities only around 17% of workers have returned to their offices.

Every company I’m involved with is fundamentally appraising the purpose of office space. No longer will ‘working from home’ require explanation. ‘Working from the office’ will be expected only for a reason. 

“Our forced experiment has revealed that much of our working pattern made no sense – for productivity, for cost or for our quality of life”

There are tasks that still benefit from physical meeting, such as collaboration, training, creativity and relationship-building, but those consume perhaps two or three days a week.

Our forced experiment has revealed that much of our working pattern made no sense – for productivity, for cost or for our quality of life.

As more work gets done from home everything else follows. Online retail jumped from around 19% to 34% and, although it has adjusted back a little, we’ve seen five years’ growth in six months. 

And all other stay-at-home spend has accelerated: prepared meals, Netflix, live entertainment streaming, exercise and video gaming.

Meanwhile, shops and restaurants are being shuttered, performance and cultural venues are in jeopardy, transport services are being pared back, airlines are in financial distress. 

These changes are tragic but they will prove, at least in part, irreversible. London hotel revenue per room has fallen by 75%. The commercial centres of major cities are being hollowed out.

Google mobility data shows footfall in retail and recreation venues in cities across the UK is down by at least 40%. Some high streets and retail parks in residential areas have benefited as spend has localised, but urban centres and malls with weakened anchors may never recover from their near-death experience.

We may wish none of this were true. We may call on the government for a plan to restore normality. But once changes have been under way this long there is no path back.

And yet, the longer-term effects are not fully clear. Part of the recent surge in home moving is pent-up demand, but some is a reappraisal of working patterns and lifestyles. 

Why pay city-centre housing costs when visits to the office will be much less frequent? Or, conversely, some are moving closer in to avoid public transport.

“The landscape is changing forever. Every business is in shock. It is natural to yearn for what is lost. But it is too late even for a vaccine to whisk us back to the past”

Whole industries, such as secondary education, entertainment or international travel, are facing challenges to their model. As they are reshaped, their associated retail will change, too.

For some households, Covid has been a personal crisis for health, family or livelihood. But many are using this time to reconsider their lives. They’re finding that what they really need is less: less work, less travel, less busy routine, less stuff.

The landscape is changing forever. Every business is in shock. It is natural to yearn for what is lost. But it is too late even for a vaccine to whisk us back to the past. 

We are never returning to the way we were living or working or spending in 2019. We must strain to look forward. For opportunities will arise. 

Whenever changing consumer behaviours coincide with new technologies, new models spring forth. The pandemic of 1918-1920 was followed by the Roaring Twenties. 

Not everything is yet clear, but it is time to think about reinventing, not recovering.