ReThink Productivity Podcast
In this exciting podcast, Simon Hedaux from ReThink Productivity shares his insights and strategies for improving productivity and efficiency in the retail and hospitality industries. With the help of clients, partners, and the ReThink team, Simon covers everything from measuring and tracking productivity to developing and implementing effective strategies.
Whether you're a business owner, manager, or employee, this podcast is a must-listen for anyone who wants to learn how to get more done and improve their bottom line.
Here's what you can expect to learn:
- How to measure and track productivity
- Proven strategies for improving efficiency and reducing waste
- How to create a culture of productivity and innovation
- Tips for motivating and engaging your team
- Real-world examples of how other businesses have used ReThink Productivity to achieve success
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ReThink Productivity Podcast
Footfall Insights May 2025
Diane Wehrle CEO at Rendle Intelligence and Insights joins Simon for their monthly chat about footfall trends and shopping behaviours from March to April 2025. Consumer confidence has taken a hit as Easter trading results reveal ongoing caution, with the GFK Index dropping from -19 in March to -23 in April 2025. Despite footfall increasing by 7.2% in April year-on-year, the combined March-April period showed minimal growth of just 0.2% when accounting for Easter timing differences.
• Consumer confidence dropped across most age groups except 25-34 year olds
• Retail parks saw 2.7% footfall increase while shopping centres declined by 0.7%
• High street sales dropped 2.2% over the March-April period
• Fashion sales down 5% in the first four months of 2025
• Clothing and footwear prices decreased 0.4% in April, suggesting retailer discounting
• Overall inflation rose to 3.5%, driven by housing, utilities and communication costs
• National Living Wage and NI increases took effect end of April, adding pressure to retailers
• Recent cyber attacks on retailers highlight security vulnerabilities and potential additional costs
• PWC research suggests declining consumer sentiment typically precedes behavioural changes by six months
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Welcome to the Productivity Podcast. We're back for our monthly chat. Diane world return, CEO and founder at Rendell Intelligence, and we are now in April 2025, which covers Easter. Hi, Diane.
Speaker 2:Hi Simon, how are you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, good, thank you All good. So we're in what should be one of the key trading periods of the year now shouldn't it outside of Christmas?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. This year was a bit strange because obviously last year, in 2024, Easter was at the tail end of March and this year it's in the middle of April, so that offset has caused some distortion. But to get over that, quite a lot of the data houses have put an average out for March and April which sort of gives that balances that out a little and I wish I could say it was fabulous news.
Speaker 1:That's not good.
Speaker 2:Well, it's not fantastic and it's a bit of a holding pattern really. I think the data on consumer confidence which I think is probably maybe where I'll start with actually is saying that consumers are nervous. The latest GFK data so they produce Consumer Confidence Index each month and they produce it fairly early in the month, so about the same time as just after Easter showed that their consumer confidence dropped by four points on their index score, so from minus 19 in March to minus 23 in April on their index score, so from minus 19 in March to minus 23 in April. Consumers are definitely feeling more nervous and that was reinforced by the recent PwC consumer sentiment report. And they showed that consumers of all ages were feeling less positive.
Speaker 1:Apart from the 25 to 34 year olds, which is probably fueled by increased wage increases, consumers are generally quite nervous and that impacted what occurred in april and spending in april that's so that 25 age band I suppose that's people who are again coming out of uni, almost isn't it and then in in their first jobs and starting at a junior level and then maybe getting bigger, bigger pay increases, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And of course you know the wage market, you know the employment market is quite tight. People are looking for good people and we've seen some good pay rises over the last couple of years and I think that's flowing through into that 25 to 34-year-old age group. And of course they haven't probably yet tied themselves down to mortgages as much and many of them haven't got families, so they aren't incurring those fixed costs that a lot of older people are. So they're sitting there looking at wage increases and feeling quite positive really, but what's the rest of us who are slightly older, laboring under increased costs?
Speaker 1:Indeed. I mean, we've talked about this now for quite a while, haven't we? In terms of kind of this turbulent, turbulent air and treacherous water, so it feels again still unstable. What were some of the other details that you've seen in this time period?
Speaker 2:yeah, so footfall, um, which was produced by sensomatics, that's footfall into retail, which is a good proxy for how many customers stores are attracting went up significantly in April by 7.2% from April last year. But of course, don't forget, Easter wasn't in April last year, so we're looking at a low, comparable Over the two months up March and April. So that takes out the distortion of the offset of Easter. Footfall was up by 0.2% last year, so not a massive increase at all and most of that was from retail parks. So 2.7% increase in retail parks. So people were definitely going out of town to shop Shopping centres. Actually, footfall dropped over the two months by 0.7%. So the fashion know, the fashion element, the discretionary element was, you know, football dropped and interestingly, BRC also did this two-month average as well and they came out with an average of 4.3% increase over the two months. But of course that includes store sales and non-store sales in town and out of town. The whole gamut. Sales did go up in April by 7%, so similar to the Sensomatic data, but they'd only gone up in March by 1.1%, which of course was non-Easter versus Easter last year. So 4.3% up over the two months, which is good, but of course, as I said, that includes food, non-food and non-store sales.
Speaker 2:In terms of sales in the high street, measured by Beauclair, Easter wasn't fabulous, April wasn't fabulous. It was flat on last year, 0.1% below April last year. So given that we had Easter this year in April and we didn't have it last year, that's not particularly strong. And over the two months, March and April, high street sales dropped by 2.2%. So you know people in high streets are having a fairly challenging time. You know people in high streets are having a fairly challenging time.
Speaker 2:So not great I mean Sensomatic said over the two months. You know footfall in the high streets is just 0.2% up. So it's not surprising that sales aren't rocketing through the roof in the high streets. Footfall's not having, you know, an amazing change either. So you know, I think people are just waiting to see what's happening quite cautious. You know it was good news in the previous few weeks with the reduction in interest rates, but then inflation came through during this week, which has gone up to 3.5%, reflecting increases in housing and utility prices, which is the main driver of that and, interestingly, also what the ONS call communication, which is essentially telephony prices. That's gone up significantly as well. So that's going to pinch a lot of people. But on the plus side, for retail destinations, clothing and footwear is actually in a period of deflation. So in april prices drop by 0.4, possibly through discounting um as people aren't really buying a lot of fashion I suppose weather dependency isn't it.
Speaker 1:And then we're in that season now where it's kind of swimwear and holiday stuff, isn't it so if you've not booked a holiday abroad, that'll slow down sales. If the weather's not good, that'll slow down sales, although we'll see where it pans out in in may, because we had a period of nice weather, so that, yeah, fashion's always stuck in that cycle, isn't it of weather dependency and, to some degree, how much we're spending going abroad yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:but you know, last april, fashion you know fashion was did go up, inflation went up, which of course that fed the reduction in fashion sales and now of course retailers are forced to discount a little bit and people, you know I think fashion's just had a really challenging time. It continues to be challenging. The Beauclair data has shown that over the first four months of the year, fashion sales have dropped by just over 5%, which is better than last year where they dropped over 6%, but it's still, you know, pulling overall sales in our high streets down by a long way. In fact, other people, you know people have also pulled back on other spending. You know, food and drink, general retail, which is department stores, health and beauty, beauty all of those have seen bigger reductions over these four months than the last four months of the four months last year.
Speaker 1:so people are generally quite cautious because we're just uncertain about where the future is, what the future is going to hold for us so kind of same summary as some previous episodes people are cautious, we're spending less big tickets tricky if that's what you're trying to sell. I suppose the one thing that we've probably not seen come through yet and it'd be interesting how and if it does is april. End of april was the first time employers had to pay the new national living wage and the ni increased contributions. So maybe may might be too soon june, july, august we might see some impact of that where, if this sales and footfall train continues, that's, that's really double whammy, because costs have gone up and my sales have plateaued or gone down absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 2:And but the positive thing will be that people will probably have some feeling, a little bit more confidence about the impact of that on themselves, because I think that's created a few shockwaves amongst employees. You know, will their employer, you know, contract the workforce? Will they lose their jobs because they can't afford to pay the increase in I? So if we can get beyond that, I think people might feel a little bit more confident. Although PWC do say that you know a low, a lowering of consumer sentiment actually precursors a change of behavior six months ahead. So they say they've typically seen that when consumer sentiment declines we see that change of behavior in six months. So they seem to say that it was a precursor to even worse trading, which doesn't sound particularly encouraging, particularly as then we'll be virtually at christmas yeah, okay, well, we'll deal with that when we get the figures hopefully there's some sunshine, bright news in the sky, but yeah, it'd be interesting to see how, um the unemployment figures are tracking as well.
Speaker 1:As we get into kind of three months post national living wage, I have a a sneaky feeling that that may start to rise, because people have to make difficult decisions based on trading.
Speaker 2:Yes, absolutely. You know. The things like the cyber attacks in retail have created uncertainty as well. That's sort of you know, making the ground a little bit rocky for retailers as well. I mean, the cost for M&S, for example, is 300 million, I think, as we speak today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's different figures being bandied around, but I mean, clearly it's been huge from a, I suppose, an emotional point of view for the colleagues and all the people trying to fix it, and then from a hard cash point of view, from losing sales, and then from a customer point of view of there'll be sympathy up to a point but then people will have to shop elsewhere if they can't get the goods yeah, and also, of course, m&s and other retailers will be now looking at their own systems quite critically and thinking do we need to increase our expenditure on cybersecurity, which, of course, has to be taken from somewhere else on their balance sheet?
Speaker 2:So it's, you know, it's robbing Peter to pay Paul, but they need to make sure they can trade, and you know this is a worst-case scenario for M&S, isn't it really yeah?
Speaker 1:it's a shot across the bows for other companies, isn't it If they've kicked it down the road? If it's not important, I'm sure it's important in most organizations. But yeah, I suspect there's been some interesting senior executive conversations in lots of boardrooms from the IT department pushing for those things to get fast-tracked, reviewed. Um, you know, increasing budget as you say, but there's not not a bottomless pit. So, yeah, interesting if, if there's any more or how that pans out, or if this was just really a wake-up call. Um, you know they've got critical press and the people that have done it and m&s have got some relatively good press in that and some of the co-op side of it. Yeah, it's whether this is a sustained thing or it's really just a wake-up call and a PR stunt to show no one's safe.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 1:We'll pause there. I always say this at the end of these. Hopefully we'll be back next month with some good news. We'll see it will have been sunny in May. We know that at the time of recording. That maybe helps us feel a little bit better and buy some slightly different things. But yeah, I think that again, the sentiment is lots of uncertainty. People aren't sure and therefore they don't spend.
Speaker 2:No, no, I mean it's a no penalty thing to do is hold back on your spending. You don't have to incur any penalty if you just don't spend any money absolutely great to speak, as always, and we'll catch up next month. Great, look forward to it.
