Comment: Retail on a journey – incomers welcome

Some of the best new retail in the UK does not have its origins here, it’s a lesson for us all.

Incomers, immigrants, ‘foreigners’ – call them what you will – get a pretty bad press at the moment, or at least they do if you happen to be a reader of the Daily Mail. But wait. Before you stop reading on the basis that Retail Week has somehow decided that the BNP or even UKIP are to be promoted, don’t worry. This is a paeon of praise for those arriving on these shores, intending to stay and who are largely unknown this side of the Channel. In retail terms, formats from elsewhere are among the most popular stores on the high street. We can’t get enough of them.

And think cheap. Whether it’s IKEA, Tiger or, as of last Friday, Hema, we all seem to find retail spaces that feature loud graphics and brightly coloured merchandise to our liking. Discount or low-cost non-food retail, as provided by overseas arrivals looks, on the face of it, so much better than the home grown equivalent. Take the graphics. In Hema, these are multi-coloured and may be about in-store navigation, but they are also as much about the way they look as what they actually say. The shopper would be right in inferring that bright and big, in graphic terms equates to cheap and cheerful.

There is also a sense of the well-organised market about most offers of this kind – retail propositions where there is a feel of artless chaos, but everything is in fact massively pre-planned, as in any other high street chain. Worth noting too is that IKEA and Tiger do like to take the shopper on a journey, around every part of the store if possible, the theory being that if we see it we’ll like it and buy it. This is not without its frustrations and is the reason why some years ago IKEA began to provide shortcuts, but even without these, we kept on coming.

Today, in keeping with the multicultural democracy that we are, retailers of all kinds view the UK as a good place to make new landfall and they are welcomed. The only criterion for entry that shoppers impose is that new retailers should keep us entertained and at the lower end of the market it’s more often a case of job done than not. Perhaps society at large should take a look at the benefits of our open-door retail policy – some of the best new formats are not born here.