Wet Weather keeps UK Shoppers Away High Street Over Easter

High street footfall has dropped 9.6% on Good Friday and 6.9% on Saturday according to new data from Springboard.

As there is an improvement in weather on Sunday, shoppers ventured outdoor and pushing up high street footfall levels by 1.9%.

When compared to Friday and Saturday there is a rise of 5% footfall boost in retail parks and shopping centres.

“Despite positive results on Easter Sunday, retail footfall up to 12pm on Easter Monday has taken a tumble,” Springboard insights director Diane Wehrle said.

“This decline was undoubtedly caused by rain that hit much of the UK in the morning and also likely to be due to the fact that shoppers had already made their trips earlier in the weekend.”

Retail parks and shopping centres when compared with greater number of high streets means that the drop in footfall in high streets pulled the overall result for all UK destinations down to -2.4% on Good Friday and -3% on Easter Saturday.

After a poor trading period this year the appeal of retail parks and shopping centres is likely to be the draw of discounts offered by multiple retailers

National payday before Easter weekend also have helped to boost shopping trips as households were likely to have some discretionary spending budget available that had not yet have been spent or allocated.

PCA Predict’s head of marketing Chris Boaz added “While we expected sales growth to slow down this Easter, we’re surprised to see such a steep drop at 1.4% down from last year on Good Friday.

“Despite this weekend’s bad weather, shoppers have been hitting the high street instead of shopping online.”

An interesting thing is that traffic to mobile devices continued growing although overall sales were down.

“This year we’ve seen an increase in traffic across mobile devices, which points to the importance for retailers to optimise their websites and customer-facing platforms not only to improve data quality on the back-end, but to improve user experience and customer satisfaction.”