January retail sales are weak, fashion struggles says BRC

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Feb 9, 2021

Another set of figures to show just how bad January was for UK store retailers… and how good it was for e-tailers.

Add together customers reining in spending after the usual festive season excess and the national lockdown that closed all non-essential stores and you have the sharpest decline since last May, latest retail sales figures from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) show.

On a three-month basis, total ‘non-essential’ store sales for January fell 36.5% and by 19.8% on a like-for-like basis. By sharp contrast, online sales increased 83%, the highest year-on-year uplift on record.

Those stores deemed ‘essential’ saw like-for-like sales up 7.1%. So that meant total retail sales in the four weeks to January 30 fell just 1.3% on a year ago, below the three-month average growth of 0.3%, but above the 12-month average decline of 0.4%. 

BRC chief executive Helen Dickinson said: “The current lockdown has hit non-essential retailers harder than in November, with the new variant hampering consumer confidence and leading customers to hold back on spending – especially on clothing and footwear. 

“Meanwhile, retailers have worked incredibly hard to expand their online delivery and click & collect offerings to ensure everyone can get the products they need during lockdown. This has led to record growth for online non-food sales and is a testament to the resilience and innovation of retail, which in the face of the pandemic, has rapidly adapted and invested in online platforms and delivery logistics”. 

KPMG’s UK head of retail Paul Martin added: “For the first time since last spring, we saw total monthly sales decline and even the on-going demand for groceries and home-related categories was not enough to halt the fall. 

“Although online channels continued to experience historic growth with more than 60% of all non-food sales transacted online, the lockdown meant that the traditional January sales period did not really materialise for the rest of the retail sector, with just a handful of categories recording any growth”.