Industry

In all my 30 years in retail, I have never seen anything as singularly destructive, disruptive and market-changing as the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. You don’t need me to tell you it was a crisis on a truly global scale, a year on from the first lockdowns, countries across the world are still reeling from the containment measures that forced businesses to shut their doors and lay off staff. Retail, in many ways, was the hardest hit sector. Although grocery retail remained buoyant feeding the nations, many high streets were left barren and shopping malls empty. As customers began to slowly trickle back, retailers needed to kickstart their cash flow and adapt to a significantly changed environment. For some that meant driving store traffic with tempting promotions, giving confidence to shoppers to shop and store colleagues to work with new health and safety measures, or investment in online to offline capabilities to appeal... Read more