Blood on the high street as retailers suffer their worst year ever

Last year was the worst ever for British retailers, says Sarah Butler in The Guardian. According to the British Retail Consortium and accountants KPMG, total sales slipped by 0.1% , the worst performance since they began monitoring the sector in 1995. One of the main factors behind the downturn was a 0.9% fall in sales in the “crucial” final two months of the year when many retailers make most of their money. In contrast to the high street misery, online sales rose by 2.6% in November and December.

Sales of clothing and footwear were hit particularly badly, say Andrew Atkinson and Lucy Meakin on Bloomberg. They fell by 2.3% year-on-year in the last three months, with retailers having to offer “deep discounts” to attract customers. This meant that stores from Marks & Spencer to John Lewis ended up being hit particularly hard. It’s not surprising that the retail sector is underperforming the UK market as a whole.

Still, some stores have managed to escape the carnage, as Ashley Armstrong points out in The Times. Next, as so often, impressed investors, growing sales in the final two months of the year by 5.3%. And “despite expectations of no growth”, Dixons Carphone recorded a 2% rise in electrical sales for the ten weeks to 4 January. This was mainly down to increased sales of “supersized flatscreen TVs, Dyson hairdryers and Apple AirPod headphones” during Black Friday, which Dixons managed to stretch into a two-week period. This is good news for the company, which is in the middle of a turnaround programme led by CEO Alex Baldock.

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It’s nice to see that someone is clinging on, says James Moore in The Independent. But don’t bet on Dixons “doing much beyond walking” over the year ahead. For one thing, you have to wonder whether consumers are going to be buying smart speakers or Apple headphones in the same numbers in 2020. In any case, Dixons’ overall sales were only flat thanks to the “bottom falling out of the mobile phone market” as people grow tired of shelling out “for new handsets that aren’t that much different to last year’s models”.

Internet sales: too little, too late?

One thing that should worry traditional retailers is the “lacklustre” performance of their online operations, which were expected to “deliver significant sales growth” to compensate for shrinking physical sales, says Jonathan Eley in the Financial Times. This suggests that many of the big chains are paying the price for having moved online “too late, and with too little conviction”.

M&S saw its online sales go up by only 1.5%, much lower than the results delivered by online-only brands such as Asos (up 15%) and Boohoo (40%). Even Next’s 15% rise in online sales involved “lower-margin sales of third-party products”. While traditional retailers hope recent investment in e-commerce will “bear fruit”, the competition from online-only operators “will only get more intense”.