Retailers reporting their figures mention the weather at their peril.
There is always a commentator ready and eager to sneer that it is a pathetic excuse for poor sales, even if half your stores have been flooded and several others reduced to smouldering wrecks by lightning strikes.
Even so, I feel moved to mention it following the unseasonally warm weekend which saw a sell-out crowd of 70,000 enjoy the Grand National at Aintree, but the UK TV audience slump by 18% because it was just too nice to be indoors watching the box.
The very same weekend, the miserable faces of just about every retailer not selling ice creams, barbecues, bedding plants or lawnmowers clearly told the story that those missing telly punters were not out in retail parks, or on high streets testing the capacity of our tills under the midday sun.
In the old days, unseasonal weather did not matter a toss in the great scheme of things, as the shoppers who would not cross our threshold in a blizzard or a heatwave would find their way back when normal miserable weather resumed.
Online seduction
But now of course in our ’www’ world the customer who swapped their store visits for Aintree or the beach can so easily be seduced by an online competitor in the evening, in the warm wine-induced and winning betting slip afterglow.
So do we just have to lay back lathered in Factor 50 and think of England, accepting adverse climate change as just another Brexit-like screw in the coffin of bricks and mortar retailers, or can we do something about it?
”We can certainly give it our best shots to compete with the lure of the beach, park, garden or golf course by making our stores mega exciting”
Well Canute couldn’t stop the tide, Trump is struggling with his wall and I don’t rate our chances of changing the weather.
But we can certainly give it our best shots to compete with the lure of the beach, park, garden or golf course by making our stores mega exciting, breathtakingly inspirational and a divine pleasure to visit even if the sun is cracking the paving stones outside.
Maximise technology
In an era when it is tough to separate shoppers from their phones unless their handset batteries explode, an in-store wow factor that beats London’s theatreland is the very least we can do.
“We also need to maximise the ever-advancing analytical technology to ensure that our supply chains, stores and advertising adapt swiftly”
We also need to maximise the ever-advancing analytical technology to ensure that our supply chains, stores and advertising adapt swiftly to make the most of whatever the weather throws at us, be that out of season hot spells, cold snaps, flash floods, mud slides, howling gales or snowstorms.
Finally, whatever it takes in effort and innovation we must never surrender our customers to the convenience of Amazon’s ever-alluring ‘1-Click’ ordering.
If we do all this and the elements still deliver a knockout blow we can at least assure our starving staff and shareholders that we did not give up without a fight as we consider Plan B – diversification into budgie smugglers, wetsuits, beer gardens, ice-cream vans, snowploughs and industrial-capacity water pumps.
Either that, or we can organise a visit to the races.
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