If I had a fiver for every time I’ve heard a retailer say, “value is more important now than it’s ever been,” I’d be challenging Elon Musk for the title of world’s richest man.
But the reality is that value is literally more important now than it’s ever been – and it’s a challenge for retailers that looks set to get even tougher this year.
April is looming large in everyone’s mind and there is absolutely no doubt that reality is going to bite – and bite hard – when wage bills and National Insurance contributions push costs to a new high for the sector.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the mults have embarked on a price war and, for the gazillionth time, more and more big retailers are making moves on the convenience sector. Historically, very few big retailers have managed to make a convenience-scale model work, but their continued incursions into convenience retailing certainly don’t help.
Plus there are a thousand other challenges going on that mean consumers are counting every penny and are looking for the best value they can get. That’s long been the case, of course, but this time it feels somehow more urgent.
So how can local retailers square that circle of spiralling costs and consumer demand for value? It’s making margin even harder to come by at a time when margin is what we all need, just to cover those ever-increasing additional costs.
What’s the answer? This was the question we posed to some of Scotland’s brightest retailers for this issue’s cover story and the answers we got make for very interesting reading. Nothing inspires creativity quite like a crisis and we’re seeing some genuine creativity among the leading lights of our sector.
‘Resilience’ has become the hallmark of our industry and we’re going to need all the resilience we can muster in 2025. But local retailing is also characterised by good, clever, creative people who are more than willing to share their ideas with fellow retailers. This feels like a year where we may need to rely on one another more than ever before. We need to share best practice, clever solutions and good insights for the benefit of the entire local retailing sector. We’re all in this together and if delivering genuine value to our customers is one of the keys to unlocking a sustainable future, we could do worse than finding that key and sharing it with each other as fast as we can.
Antony Begley, Publishing Director, SLR
Time to get creative with value?
If I had a fiver for every time I’ve heard a retailer say, “value is more important now than it’s ever been,” I’d be challenging Elon Musk for the title of world’s richest man.
But the reality is that value is literally more important now than it’s ever been – and it’s a challenge for retailers that looks set to get even tougher this year.
April is looming large in everyone’s mind and there is absolutely no doubt that reality is going to bite – and bite hard – when wage bills and National Insurance contributions push costs to a new high for the sector.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, the mults have embarked on a price war and, for the gazillionth time, more and more big retailers are making moves on the convenience sector. Historically, very few big retailers have managed to make a convenience-scale model work, but their continued incursions into convenience retailing certainly don’t help.
Plus there are a thousand other challenges going on that mean consumers are counting every penny and are looking for the best value they can get. That’s long been the case, of course, but this time it feels somehow more urgent.
So how can local retailers square that circle of spiralling costs and consumer demand for value? It’s making margin even harder to come by at a time when margin is what we all need, just to cover those ever-increasing additional costs.
What’s the answer? This was the question we posed to some of Scotland’s brightest retailers for this issue’s cover story and the answers we got make for very interesting reading. Nothing inspires creativity quite like a crisis and we’re seeing some genuine creativity among the leading lights of our sector.
‘Resilience’ has become the hallmark of our industry and we’re going to need all the resilience we can muster in 2025. But local retailing is also characterised by good, clever, creative people who are more than willing to share their ideas with fellow retailers. This feels like a year where we may need to rely on one another more than ever before. We need to share best practice, clever solutions and good insights for the benefit of the entire local retailing sector. We’re all in this together and if delivering genuine value to our customers is one of the keys to unlocking a sustainable future, we could do worse than finding that key and sharing it with each other as fast as we can.
Antony Begley, Publishing Director, SLR
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