The Omicron wave disrupted city centre sales, pushing sales back down below their 2019 levels for the period November 2021 to January 2022. The average city lost 1.2 weeks of sales with medium-sized cities suffering the most. Food & Drink and Entertainment were the worst hit sectors, losing 1.3 and 1.7 weeks of sales respectively.
Over the last few months, as we have been supplying retail sales data to our clients, Beauclair has been seeing the clear consequences of the spread of the Omicron variant.
Chart 1 shows retail sales over the six months from August 2021 to January 2022. Sales are compared against the baseline year of 2019 which is the last normal, pre-lockdown year.
As can be seen, for the first three months of this period, retail sales matched or outpaced sales from 2019.
This changed with the Omicron outbreak with a clear drop in sales levels relative to the baseline.
Chart 1: August 2021 to January 2022 retail sales compared to the average month in 2019
The impact of Omicron has to be seen in the context of the relative performance of cities as classified by size.
As can be seen in Chart 2, the retail sales performance of small cities relative to the 2019 baseline was stronger than both medium and big cities.
Just prior to the Omicron outbreak, big cities were performing better than medium cities, which is the opposite of what happened in the three lockdown periods between March 2020 and April 2021.
Chart 2: Relative performance of cities by size compared to the same month in 2019
Interestingly, this meant that Omicron had a smaller relative impact on medium cities than on both big and small cities.
Chart 3 shows the relative sales position for each type of city in the three months before and during the omicron wave.
It shows that while both big and small cities lost on average approximately 11% of sales each month during the wave, medium cities lost about 6% of sales each month.
Chart 3: Monthly sales compared to the same month in 2019 by city size
Looking at the percentage decline in monthly sales does not, however, provide the whole picture because December normally accounts for about 50% more retail sales than the average for the rest of the months.
To capture the overall impact of Omicron, we inflated actual sales for each city during the Omicron wave by the relative performance that city in the three months before the Omicron wave to calculate the sales lost due to Omicron, as shown in Chart 4.
Chart 4: Retail sales lost to Omicron compared to the average month in 2019
This allowed us to calculate weeks of sales for each type of city as shown in Table 1.
This shows that on average small cities barely suffered a loss of sales due to Omicron, while the sales loss in Large and Medium cities was significant, with Medium-sized cities suffering the most.
Table 1: Weeks of retail sales lost due to Omicron by city size
Finally, we have analysed the impact of Omicron on different retail sectors, applying the same method used for cities as a whole to average sector sales figures for all of our clients.
Chart 5 shows that Grocery suffered less than half a week’s loss of sales due to Omicron while those sectors that are most dependent on in-person experience, namely Food & Drink and Entertainment suffered the most (1.3 and 1.7 weeks respectively).
Chart 5: Average weeks of sales lost by retail sector across Beauclair’s BID clients
This article is based on detailed offline sales data for 16 English and Scottish cities provided by Beauclair to clients as part of its monthly data service for BIDs, local authorities and Chambers of Commerce