15,000 shops pull down their shutters for good
AROUND 15,000 shops have shut for good in the past year as rolling lockdowns devastated high streets, with an average of three closing every day in Scotland.
Businesses were left overnight with zero revenue and have now been shut for almost seven months, irreversibly changing the make-up of town and city centres.
The closures have felled some of the high street’s best-known names, including Topshop, Laura Ashley and Debenhams.
Shops have missed out on £22billion of sales since March 23 last year, forcing them to lay off 185,447 staff.
Bosses shut 15,187 stores permanently, equivalent to 42 per day throughout the UK, according to the figures from the Centre for Retail Research.
The figures include 23,055 staff who have lost their jobs this year in the most recent lockdown, and 1,369 stores which have closed their doors.
The Scottish hospitality industry was also dealt a hammer blow from Covid-19 last year, with the sector’s annual turnover slashed from £2billion to £276million.
It was a similar picture throughout the UK, with the pandemic’s effect on pubs and restaurants being described as like ‘an asteroid that hit the earth’.
Overall the industry is missing out on £86billion, or £1.7billion per week, of sales.
Chains were forced to cull thousands of outlets and hundreds of thousands of staff with a total of 11,900 licensed premises shutting their doors since December 2019 and 660,000 jobs disappearing. It comes after a PwC report found ‘the real impact of the pandemic is yet to be felt’ on the high street. Its research shows 1,264 retail stores closed down last year in Scotland, while only 612 new units opened.
Store closures had already been outstripping openings since 2016, well before the pandemic. But the figure could be even higher as the 1,264 closures do not include those which have shut temporarily.
Pub bosses yesterday estimated that around 200 bars have been forced to close their doors for good.
Retail bosses have urged Nicola Sturgeon to speed up the timetable for allowing shops to reopen following the present lockdown which has forced them to remain closed since Boxing Day.
The Scottish Government said it aims to publish a retail strategy in the summer.