RETAIL RECOVERY

Chamber president says our high streets will bounce back but long-term investment needed

14 per cent fewer stores compared to 2016.

“The changes in consumer shopping patterns, changes to how our town and city centres work, changes to how we travel and work will all impact the direction of recovery for our high streets. “The retail sector will adapt to these new and

historic challenges.

However, the success of that will come down to long-term sustained investment and support in our centres of business and commerce.

“That is we are calling upon government to devise a long-term recovery programme for Scotland’s high streets.”

One of the local small shops preparing to welcome customers back in after months of restrictions is gift shop Contempo, based in the city’s King Street.

The shop’s owner welcomed having the clarity of a date to re-open and said the process of re-opening the store felt like “starting from scratch”.

Craig Morrison said: “I would say it’s good to have a date in the diary to work towards and I do hope that by having a date quite a bit in the future that it will give time to get more people vaccinated so that we don’t have to go into another lockdown later in the year - personally I would rather wait a bit longer before coming out of lockdown than have to do this again.

“Even though we have been trading from our website the shop has pretty much been in limbo so its a case of getting new stock - already our suppliers are saying they are overwhelmed with orders - and getting everything clean and tidy.

“We also are going to need to spend time with staff because the amount of time we have been in lockdown it is amazing the things you forget so its like starting from scratch again.

“Although it is daunting, we cannot wait to get the doors back open again.”

Although it is daunting ,we cannot wait to get the doors back open again