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
Don't miss out on this opportunity to learn from the experts and get ahead of the curve with your own business.
ReThink Productivity Podcast
Footfall Insights July 2025
Diane Wehrle CEO at Rendle Intelligence and Insights joins Simon for their monthly chat about footfall trends. The UK's summer heatwave has driven an 8.5% decline in high street retail sales compared to last year. This retail slump reflects a combination of weather impacts, calendar effects, and persistent economic headwinds affecting consumer spending patterns.
• UK high street footfall down 3% during June's heatwave periods
• Food spending up 4.1% while non-food spending increased only 2.2%
• Average Transaction Value remained relatively stable (down just 1.1%)
• Online spending holds steady at 26% of total retail sales since January
• Rising inflation (now 3.6%) and increasing unemployment creating consumer caution
• Post-COVID consumer priorities shifting toward holidays over retail purchases
• UK domestic tourism seeing growth during hot weather, but spending benefits bars and restaurants more than retail
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Welcome to the Productivity Podcast. I'm delighted again to be joined by Diane Wells, ceo and founder of Rendell Intelligence and Insights. Hi, diane, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm good, Simon. Thank you. How are you?
Speaker 1:Good, good, it's still warm. It's been warm forever. Unusually, in the UK we always talk about the weather. We can't cope when it's too cold, too warm, too wet, too dry, but it has been exceptionally hot.
Speaker 2:It has, and I think we're on our third little mini heatwave, I think. We are at the time of recording.
Speaker 1:We are indeed so May to June. I think it was hot quite a lot of that, if memory serves me right and exceptionally hot. So has that been a good thing or a bad thing?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's been more. If I had to put my money on it I'd probably say it's been more of a bad thing. Well, I think it's been more. If I had to put my money on it I'd probably say it's been more of a bad thing. I think we you know UK consumers don't really do well in the heat and our shopping environments aren't really suited to the heat. So we've got a few indicators. Of course, we've got footfall in high streets and into stores, and then we also have high street spending. And then we also, on top of that, have the spending recorded by the BRC, which includes town centre and out of town, and footfall into stores in high streets was down 3%, so fewer people were going into stores In the high streets. As a whole, measured by MRI, it was just about flat, about minus 0.1.
Speaker 2:But spending in high streets, as measured by Beauclair, was 8.5% below June 2024. Was eight and a half percent below June 2024, and a couple of reasons for that. One is, of course, the weather. People tend to defer to other locations when it's very hot. Last thing many shoppers want to do is go and spend money in town centres, particularly ahead, well ahead of this, the school summer break. It was very early June, too early to be by summer holiday clothing and stuff, so they tended to want to go elsewhere. But also there was a calendar offset. So Beauclair used the calendar month and in June there were only nine Saturdays this year versus 10 Saturdays last year. So of course the fewer number of Saturdays does impact the results. So a proportion of that 8.5% would have been bound up to that offset. So I'm thinking like for like it would probably mean about minus 5%, 4.5%, 5%. So last year actually in June it was minus 3.8%. So we've had two consecutive years of declining sales in June. So it's not particularly strong out there in retail at the moment.
Speaker 1:No, and, as you say, I think the important note, you know, food is Barbie food, isn't it? So that clearly goes up. But we're not. We're not set up in this country to deal with the extreme. So retail parks, big tin sheds, not many air con unless typically it's got food really uncomfortable to shopping. When we get warm in this country you don't typically then go into the high street. So and we were talking off air the regional shopping centres, your Meadow Halls, your Westfields, your Trafford centres, probably the better places. I don't know if, if there's any data that shows they get bigger footfall when it's really hot because they're the big open spaces, but everything else just isn't a nice environment no, it is not.
Speaker 2:Naturally, the brc identified that food spending went up by 4.1 percent, non-food spending 2.2 percent, so double the amount of increase in food, and that non-food spending would have been everything and it would have been town center and out of town. So quite a few people would have gone shopping for food and bought whatever they needed whilst they're in a nice cool tesco store, as opposed to a waitress and their other supermarkets are available. So you know, you could see the difference. Really, the predominantly was food.
Speaker 2:But also what the Beauclair data shows us is that actually in high streets the ATV of spending was sort of on par with last year. It was only 1.1% down. It was the number of customers and number of transactions they made that dropped. So there are just fewer people out there buying products. They just didn't want to spend. And of course, we lost that Saturday, which would have impacted stuff as well. And food and drink in high streets was 10.5% below June 2024, whereas in June 2024, it had the 10 Saturdays it was 2.4% up on 22.3. So you can see the difference the heat makes. So, as always, we're blaming the weather partly.
Speaker 1:We do. We like to blame the weather, don't we? And that theme is very familiar. I mean, we talked I think it was last month again about ATV being relatively stable. So there's just less people buying. The ones that are buying are buying roughly the same, and I know there's kind of post this month that we're talking about. Inflation's gone up as well. So there's still all these headwinds that we've talked about now for what seems to be forever.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I mean the government. To be fair, it was. You know the increase in inflation was forecast not that that helps anyone particularly, but it's got. You know. Inflation's gone up to 3.6 percent and that's occurred in, you know, utilities for housing. It's gone up by 7.5 percent percent. You know the, the, the uh, the educational influence you know that on a private education has influenced it as well.
Speaker 2:So lots of factors have gone into that and people are having, you know, having greater expenditure this year than they did and it's tough, so their discretionary spending inevitably then has to fall. The good, the good high spot really is. I looked at internet spending as a proportion of total retail spending and that stayed completely stable. It's not moving up at all. According to the ONS, in May online spending remained at 26% of total retail spend, which it has been since January. So whilst people are buying quite a lot on online, obviously quarter of all spendings online three quarters is in store and that's not shifting. So there is some neutrality, some sort of you know, some, some stability in that area good.
Speaker 1:So bricks and mortars, as I think we've always said, it's here to stay. There's not this jeopardy or scaremongering that went on and any other kind of green shoots things that we should be thinking about. I suppose we're at that time of year say, fortunately, unfortunately we're, we're heading post-school holidays. We'll be into black friday week, won't we? And then kind of christmas again all of a sudden I know it's scary, isn't it?
Speaker 2:I know we're at the half halfway point in the year now and know I think I suppose the green shoots are that, you know, the internet hasn't overtaken bricks and mortar, as we said, and in fact, actually in the clothing, footwear arena, that proportion of spend online has come down over the last six months or so. In December it was sitting at 30%. You know the few months before that, it was around 29, 28, 27, it's now 26. So you know, people have gone back to store to buy clothing. Yes, of course people are. You know, using the internet as part of their natural buying process. I do, everyone does use it for research and and price comparison. But people are looking to stores and, whilst june was difficult because of the heat, actually people do enjoy going to stores and buying in store and that is, you know, the thing that I think we should keep.
Speaker 1:Keep it in focus really yeah, and some good deals out there as well there's you know, blank blanket deals in M&S of just under 20% off menswear for those that are interested.
Speaker 1:So you know there's some big incentives to be had if you're you're in the. So again, as a consumer, it's good for us in terms of being able to access those deals. So we won't dwell. We're kind of on this kind of path of uncertainty. Still, that again, we've talked about on many an episode, I think. I suppose a couple of things to throw in that we're seeing Unemployment seems to be rising.
Speaker 1:I'm sure everyone listening is on LinkedIn, you'll see less people changing jobs or putting their arm available to work banner on when, unfortunately, they've been part of a restructure. Lots of restructures going on head offices, field roles and, unfortunately, kind of store-based roles as people look to manage this cost-based, primarily driven by NI. But I think some of that's a bit of a smokescreen as well. There'd be poor trade and poor profit and all sorts of stuff. So maybe we keep an eye on that as much as we can in the next couple of episodes, because I think that's something that's going to start to take centre stage as we navigate towards Christmas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree completely. And of course, people see other people their friends and their relatives, losing their jobs or in a difficult position, and it means that they then rein their spending back because they have become fearful. So that caution, that consumer cautiousness that we always talk about, is all pervasive, really, because you're thinking actually, will it be me next?
Speaker 1:so the spending is pulled back, even if they don't lose their job, because they're just nervous yeah, and someone asked me this the other day and I don't know if you've got the answers. A bit of a left field question, but if it is so hot in the uk, does that mean more people go abroad to get away from our heat or more people stay at home to enjoy our weather? I'm not quite.
Speaker 2:I don't quite know the answer no, and I mean if you see the news reports of bournemouth and scotland scarborough, you see the beach is heaving with people.
Speaker 2:I think in general people value and place holidays higher up the priority list than they did before COVID. It's sort of more of a must-have now and people then will divert what was spending on products and domestic stores to holidays. I think there are a lot of fairly low-cost options for foreign holidays and deferred payment options. So people, I think, will probably opt a lot of people will opt to go abroad just for something, for a change of scene, and it is fairly expensive to holiday in the UK and so a lot of people will do that. So I think it's just the nature of how people are prizing holidays very highly, and if they go to a coastal resort in the UK it doesn't mean they necessarily go shopping either. They'll go and spend in bars and restaurants, which is great, but it won't always be in the town centre and so it doesn't mean that the town centres and the shopping centres will benefit from that either.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So yeah, that would be an interesting one to keep an eye on as the summers seem to get hotter and drier. Actually, does that economically have a big impact? Or do we adapt? And you know, I assume the more people that stay in the country and go to seaside resorts put it back into our economy, don't they, ultimately, and not into somebody else's?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. It does go into the sort of, you know, gb limited economy absolutely, and that's always helpful. But I, I probably I think that our, our holiday industry, our domestic holiday industry, is probably kitted up or used to this influx of people due to incredibly hot weather. All the time we were sort of used to lesser numbers because the weather's been so regularly poor and suddenly you get these huge numbers of people heading towards coastal resource and they're still saying we can't cope, we can't cope. So I think there's some adjustments to be had and to be made there as well yep an opportunity yeah, absolutely brilliant.
Speaker 1:We'll pause there. Fantastic to chat, as ever, consistent theme. I think let's see where the next couple of months take us as we start to navigate into probably most retailers key trading period. So thanks again, we'll catch up.
Speaker 2:Great, simon, thank you.
