Change in Business Trend in Retail Industry

As we are aware our weekly business is totally depending on the Weekend (SAT/SUN) because most of the customers with families usually will visit stores to finalise the products and purchases and the weekend business counts to 80% share of the entire week business. This new change will bring a disruptive trend in our Retail Industry especially Offline retail because this new change is about to replace the current weekend 2 days (SAT/SUN) with 3days (FRI/SAT/SUN) to test this proposal already initiative taken in some countries.

As per the study they want to bring more work and personal life balance with this new weekend (extended) and they have already rolled out this new proposition as a pilot project in all major countries in 2022, if they get any good feedback from Corporates and employees with enhanced business output in terms of productivity then Governments will bring legislation to make it official workdays.

It means new working days will be (MON/TUE/WED/THU) and weekend days will be (FRI/SAT/SUN) so that families can use this extended weekend and plan family trips to relax and enjoy time with family and in turn, it will improve the tourism business to pre-covid levels. If this becomes reality then the entire software industry will shift from 5 days to 4 days working to start with and slowly other industries will follow.

In our offline retail business especially like Consumer Electronics and mobiles, Gold Jewellery, Apparels etc gets its monthly major share of business from weekend 2 days usually, families will plan and visit stores to buy their favourite products that’s why every business group will plan for weekend paper Ads/Radio Zingles and other promotions but if this weekend becomes 3 days weekend then most of the families will plan to go out of busy cities and try to relax somewhere far of tourism places or their native places.

I suggest if we can plan to educate the customers not to wait for weekends for planning purchases instead they can plan their purchase in weekdays evening time like how Bigbazaar rolled out Wednesday bazaar as a marketing promotion to shift weekend business to week days, we need to plan to educate our employees to get adapt to this new change because every day is important not to lose their store business share in this competitive market.

I thought this information may help to plan our future action plan to counter this new change challenge.