Here’s how to help bricks and mortar retailers as they prepare to reopen

The sector’s hurting. It’s time to remove the business rate holiday from the supermarkets while extending it for the twice locked down ‘non-essential’ stores, James Moore writes

Shuttered shops: and they’ll remain that way until Wednesday, having missed out on the Black Friday bean fest  (AFP via Getty)

Amid the hype, the excitable predications of record Christmas spending, the super duper Black Friday bargain bonanza, there was Arcadia.

As the first ever online-only event dawned, Sir Philip Green’s troubled retail empire found itself on the brink of collapse with thousands of jobs at risk.

Online outlets had sensibly spread their offers out with the aim of preventing logjams, but business was still brisk. It will doubtless continue to be that way during today’s “cyber Monday”, otherwise known as JeffBezosNeedsANewYachtDay.

Bricks and mortar outlets, meanwhile, remain shuttered, propped up by government support until Wednesday. For some, that day can’t come soon enough.

Rob Cameron, CEO of Barclaycard Payments, expects they’ll be busy. He went so far as to suggest hight street retailers create a “black Wednesday” to tempt customers. But that has some unfortunate connotations.

Black Wednesday more commonly refers to 16 September 1992, when a collapse in the pound forced Britain out of the European exchange rate mechanism. It’s simply impossible to escape this country’s fraught relationship with the continent. The idea mightn’t, anyway, be the best in the midst of a pandemic.

Primark, which doesn’t sell online and doesn’t participate in the annual frenzy of discounting at this time of year, is planning extended opening hours, with the aim of reducing any potential crowding in its outlets.

Safety first is the name of the game. Crowds and queues aren’t conducive to that.

But the British Retail Consortium said its members’ shops are safe. It points to the investments the sector has made, the sanitiser that has been bought, the decluttering of aisles that has been done, the signs on the floor directing one-way systems and urging distancing, the efforts to train staff.

The trade body also pointed to Sage advice issued to the government at the end of September and available to view on the latter’s website.

It held that the closure of non-essential shops would have a “low impact on transmission” as an anti-Covid measure. It also stated that the economic hit from shutting up shops would “most affect the poorest, given employment in non-essential retail”.

Safe is what thousands of jobs in the industry aren’t. It would be a terrible injustice for their holders to have to pay the price for the government’s mismanagement of the crisis.

Arcadia isn’t the only retailer approaching a precipice. Others could find themselves in the same place, especially if January sees yet another lockdown as a result of a Christmas-related infection surge bumping up the R rate, putting everything back to square one, and leaving non-essential shops high and dry if they are included, as they were this time around.

One small consolation for staff affected by the shuttering of the shops where they work: they have at least been spared encounters with aggressive and shouty bargain-hunting customers. They won’t have had to witness and/or deal with fighting over flatscreen TVs.

Customers are less in need of special offers today than are stores, for the sake of the people who work in them.

A moratorium on rental payments comes to an end in December, the business rate holiday that has fuelled the dividends of supermarkets in April.

Perhaps it’s time for a one-off Rishi Sunak special in time for the January sales, or even before. This would involve stripping the tax break from the supermarkets while extending it for their “non-essential” cousins that are hurting. Such a move might make for a happier new year for some of their stressed-out staff.