Setting aside what is, at best, lazy, cliched, generic journalism, UK newspaper institution The Times ran the headline "Shoppers help Britain’s economy bounce back... but we shouldn’t celebrate just yet" as a prelude to an article about the rebound in Retail sales in its Saturday 22 August edition.  I applaud the sentiment, fully understand and agree with the warning not to "celebrate just yet" but take issue with the assertion that the rebound in UK sales which this week has seen reported an increase of 3.6% over pre-pandemic levels is due to shoppers returning to the high street.

As the BBC News article graph shows most ably, it would appear that the sector has achieved the hoped-for V-shaped recovery and indeed, is recording that 3.6% increase in sales.  However, it is not the 'high street' driving these statistics.  Footfall is still substantially down across the country and therefore across Retail categories.  Where Grocery continues to see increases, sectors such as Fashion are struggling with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reporting that high street clothing shops had been "the worst hit during the pandemic" and volumes of sales remained 25.7% lower than in February 2020.  More than ever, the devil is in the detail - or perhaps now the devil is in the Data...

Which brings me to what the 'V' in our title stands for: not the V-shaped rebound but instead:

vicissitude [ vi-sis-i-tood, -tyood ]

noun

  • a change or variation occurring in the course of something.
  • interchange or alternation, as of states or things.
  • alternating, or changing phases or conditions, as of life or fortune; ups and downs.
  • regular change or succession of one state or thing to another.
  • change; mutation; mutability.

(Source: Dictionary.com)

As I discussed in this blog at the end of July, it is the ratio of online to offline sales which has changed since March 2020, driven by changing behaviours necessitated by lockdown, with a 50%+ increase in the previous volume of sales now fulfilled through digital channels.  Regardless of Retail sub-sectors/categories and the vagaries of their fortunes, it's clear that the rebound is predicated upon the ongoing success of online, not the struggling high street.  Vicissitudes have taken/are taking place on grand scales and the answers to operational conundrums lie in analysing and understanding the clues and hints within the Data.

On a macro level, institutions such as the UK's ONS are able to divine national trends and shifts in behaviour whilst specialist data agencies and consulting data science analysts can report on the minutiae of detail inherent within lower-level examples.  And Retail & Hospitality businesses have the power to exploit latent analysis within the huge amounts of the data they create and collate themselves - if only they have the right data strategy to be able to achieve it...

What we used to call 'mainstream high street Retail' has been undergoing its own vicissitudes for years and COVID-19 has simply proven a massive watershed for the fortunes of some.  Big-name players are in real trouble and many of those that have adorned the high street for decades will no longer be part of the future.  At the risk of falling back upon cliche myself, change is the only constant; nothing remains immutable - when it comes to Data, I implore Retail to embrace vicissitude for the good, otherwise your days will surely be numbered...