Why is UK retail doing badly?

This morning’s retail sales figures are not what Rishi Sunak will have hoped for as he pitches his case for re-election on economic recovery. They are yet more indication that Britain has fallen out of love with shopping. Sales volumes were 2.3 per cent down in April compared with the previous month, while the March figure was revised downwards from zero to minus 0.2 percent. Some of this might be connected with the timing of Easter: the holiday weekend straddled March and April, so people will have done their food shopping, Easter egg purchases, filled their car with petrol, and everything else, in March rather than April, but the bigger picture is that retail sales volumes have never recovered from the pandemic – and they continue to fall, down 2.7 percent over the past year. We are buying 5 per cent less in the shops – by volume – than we were prior to the pandemic.