Retail ‘losing plot’ on high street

A PIONEERING retail expert from the United States has accused high street retailers of having “lost the plot” and forgetting that customers are at the heart of their business.

David Ciancio claimed that customers are saying that the high street isn’t dead, but is becoming “increasingly irrelevant”. Mr Ciancio helped launch the first supermarket loyalty card in the US in 1997 and his company, Dunnhumby, worked on the Tesco Clubcard.

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He was speaking at a retail event in Yorkshire looking at the future of the sector, which employs 11 per cent of the UK workforce and more than 200,000 people in Leeds alone. The high street is facing a squeeze from the internet, supermarkets, out-of-town shopping centres and depressed consumer spending.

Leading figures from the industry attended the event, including Peter Pritchard, commercial director at Pets at Home, who told delegates: “If you look at any of the failures that we’ve seen over the last couple of years, it’s because that fundamental thing is wrong.

“They either forgot what their shoppers wanted, or they just missed it, or they were just in the wrong place, or the world around them changed and they didn’t change fast enough.”

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Several of the speakers echoed the views of retail guru Mary Portas, who advocates the importance of community cohesion as part of a plan to regenerate the high street in the UK. Ms Portas conducted a review on Britain’s high streets for the Government and is part of an initiative which will see 12 towns receive £100,000 of public money to help with their revival.

Mr Pritchard said that Ms Portas was “on the money” with regard to the importance of “the experience”. “Increasingly, we are in a world where price is so transparent. We can all benchmark price within two seconds, but it’s really hard to benchmark experience and I think interestingly as a retailer, whether you’re a one-man band or a 300-store chain... the future will be about experience.”

Keith Nesbitt, chief operating officer at shirtmaker TM Lewin, said the sense of community will become more important, adding: “We’ve got to try and entice doctors back there, we’ve got to try and entice more community-based activities to return to the high street.”

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Dunnhumby’s head of international client leadership, Mr Ciancio said retail science will be “more around collaboration”.

Meanwhile, Daniel Butters, a partner at Deloitte, said that the high street is currently seen as “an impediment to growth”, but needs to be seen as a “platform for growth”, and Roisin Currie, group people director at bakers Greggs, said that retailers should look at high streets on a case by case basis, and must not all be branded as “a place you don’t want to go”.

Jason Curtis, company secretary and head of legal at Huddersfield-based nursery products group Mamas & Papas, who took part in the event yesterday, told the Yorkshire Post that the firm was focused on international expansion, particularly in emerging markets such as Russia, India and China.

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“It’s not an easy time for anyone in retail at the moment but a lot of hard work is going into building the brand and building sales.”

Keynote speaker, Nigel Rothband, chairman of the Retail Trust, a charity which supports people working in retail, said he envisaged that the high street of the future would have “greater social integration” and “more niche, specialist retailers”.

The event, hosted by law firm Squire Sanders, took place in association with Leeds Metropolitan University, Retail Trust, British Property Federation and Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce. It was held at Leeds Metropolitan University’s city campus.