It’s OK, Others are Worse!

As we exit lockdown and face an uncertain post CV19 period, I am disappointed with, and also astonished at the state of the market industry. My old headmaster would most definitely have given it a D- ‘Could do so much better if he immersed himself in the subject matter’. And unfortunately, exam mark standardisation doesn’t apply to real life and real people and the fallout is immense.

There appears a systematic resignation within the industry of ‘there’s nothing we can do and we’re certainly not the worst, so that’s probably ok!’ It has been mentioned that a third of UK markets will never re-open, so if we’re one of those, its OK as it’s such a sizeable chunk of the industry and we can still sleep at night – isn’t it? Many of these markets were failing anyway and the epidemic has proved a very useful excuse for failure and no it is certainly not ok.

My own team took a pin-point accurate pro-active approach to the disaster at a particularly early stage and we managed to keep every market open for trade for essential businesses. We worked with our Local Authority landlords to ensure safe operations and took a very pragmatic approach to rents. If a trader wished to trade, then they had to pay rent, otherwise we could not afford to open. Every food retailer in all our markets paid their rent and provided an extremely useful service for their communities and of course trade was brisk. Traders are far more enterprising and nimble than the large supermarket groups. We sweated social media ensuring shoppers knew we were open and our staff and traders provided home deliveries for the most vulnerable members of our society.

Within a couple of weeks post-lockdown, we actually have 4% more traders that pre-lockdown across our various markets (ranging from traditional indoor and outdoor markets to food-halls) bringing our average occupancy to nearly 90% Trade seems to vary from OK’ish to busy and we have re-booted our own expansion plans with three new sites coming online for Easter 2021.

Local Authorities are excellent at organising so many things to benefit their communities, however actively operating retail markets is perhaps one that should be left for others? Providing rent free holidays simply isn’t enough. Typically; rent should only account for 10% of the business overhead and it’s the other 90% which remains a significant problem if the turnover dries up. Focus should be on getting businesses open safely as quickly as possible Essential businesses which did operate during the lockdown needed consistent marketing to raise public awareness and all those starting up again now need just as much commercial and retailing care.

I like to think we’re one of the best, however tomorrow we will try to be even better! We’re not special; but we are hard-working, devoted and understand our industry and the people in it.