Shops need ingenuity and goodwill to recover from pandemic

With consumers still wary of Covid, shopping centres need to find ways to restore confidence, writes Martyn Mclaughlin

If the scale of the challenge facing Scotland’s shopping centres as a result of Covid-19 was not already obvious, the distinctly subdued nature of their grand reopening served as a sharp reminder of the task in hand.

At Edinburgh’s Waverley Mall, where a range of hand-sanitiser stations and social distancing measures have been put in place, along with vending machines to reassure wary shoppers, there was a mere trickle of customers yesterday morning.

Granted, the fact that the weather was predictably dreich will have been a factor, but even so, the lacklustre turnout put paid to hopes that pent-up demand would lead to a steady flow of shoppers, at least to begin with.

It is an understatement to say that the weeks and months ahead will pose an extraordinary challenge for the centre and others like it. Coronavirus has brought about a seismic shift in consumer habits, one which may prove to be permanent.

A Yougov survey published last week indicated that seven out of ten people intend to frequent local shops more often in the future. Nearly a third (31 per cent) of those surveyed said they had tended to use shopping centres for most of their non-essential purchases prior to the outbreak. However, nearly half (48 per cent) now say they would be uncomfortable visiting one.

There are a range of factors underpinning this reluctance. Not only are such centres enclosed, with funneled entry and exit points, but they occupy out-of-town locations, meaning that many shoppers face using public transport in order to get there.

While shopping centres, much like office space, will survive in some shape or form post-pandemic, ensuring they have a long-term future will require ingenuity. That could mean more automation and experimentation, with sweeping changes to how retailers design the layout of their stores.

People will still come in person to shops, but most will only do so if they can get an experience which is unique as well as safe. That means more restaurants and activities as well as concepts once dismissed as gimmickry such as the use of augmented reality changing rooms.

It will take considerable time and money to even begin making those kinds of changes, however, and in the meantime, some centres and big name retailers are unlikely to survive. Scotland’s major towns and cities are fortunate in the respect that they have not followed some of their English counterparts in placing all their eggs in one basket by centring their retail strategies almost exclusively around enclosed shopping centres.

In Birmingham, for example, the regeneration of the city centre has been synonymous with the Bullring and Grand Central developments, both very much in keeping with the Us-style mega-mall blueprint. Since opening in 2003, the Bullring quickly became a major success story, attracting around 39 million visitors a year, with those numbers bolstered after the completion of the Grand Central complex a little under five years ago.

But in the wake of coronavirus it is inconceivable that footfall will return to anything close to those levels in the short to medium-term future. That is not just due to damaged consumer confidence, with shoppers wary to visit enclosed sites; it will be the painful legacy of a retail sector in freefall, particularly as the UK Government’s furlough