UK shoppers ran for cover in snowy March, footfall plunged says Ipsos

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Apr 4, 2018

Snow drove shoppers away from UK retail stores last month with visitor traffic down nearly 12% year-on-year and down close to 29% in the first week of the month. That's according to the latest report from Ipsos Retail Performance which also said that London and the South East suffered the most.

That's perhaps unsurprising given how relatively rare snow is in the region and also how dependent London is on tourist visits to boost its shopping traffic.

Ipsos also said that despite Easter falling in March, footfall failed to pick up over the public holiday and that it was the 11th consecutive month that year-on-year store footfall has declined across the UK.
 
The researcher said that the number of people entering non-food stores fell by 11.5% last month compared to the same period last year as blizzards and heavy snow continued to grip the country during the first week of March and as the bad weather ebbed and flowed during the rest of the month.

It derives the RTI from the number of individual shoppers entering over 4,000 non-food retail stores across the UK and said that Easter also failed to drive up footfall, with every region across the country performing badly compared to last year. 

Nationally, store visits fell by 6.4%, although Yorkshire and Humberside and the North West saw the most dramatic declines of 10.5% and 8.8% respectively. The Midlands, however, fared better with a relatively modest fall of 2.2%.