Opinion: Should a hung parliament put a stopper in expansion?

If there was one thing that looked reassuring in the early hours of Friday morning, it was the appearance of Lord Buckethead on the platform alongside Theresa May in Maidenhead as she accepted another term as MP for that constituency.

A bloke dressed in black with a bucket on his head? ‘Barminess as normal’ might be the executive summary of the picture on our screens, and it’s the thought running through the minds of retailers at the moment.

Uncertainty is also on their minds – and when this happens, retailers do have a tendency to put things on hold and hope that they can ‘trade through’.

Wait and see?

Whatever your view of the emerging picture, if you were faced with the prospect of opening a few new stores or not, in the current circumstances you might feel inclined to hold fire and see what happens.

“It matters little how good a store looks; if shoppers are going to stay away from the high street, then additional commitments could feel like an albatross around the neck”

There are always those, of course, who will counsel that now is a good time to plough ahead because the price of goods and services will be open to negotiation, and if you want to open a new store (and there are still some outfits that do), then this could be a good time.

The counterblast to this has to be uncertainty about consumer sentiment. It matters little how good a store looks; if shoppers are going to stay away from the high street, then additional commitments could feel like an albatross around the neck.

Time to act

This does not, however, mean that all store-related activity will cease.

For those with estates that are being refitted, repurposed, remodelled and revitalised, now is the right time to speed things up.

Even if the future looks tricky, there will come a moment when it is less so, and being prepared for this looks like common sense.

“And if all of this sounds a little counterintuitive when the obvious course of action might be to wait and see, just consider the price of inaction and doing nothing”

This means that new store opening programmes will be put on hold and existing estates may even receive bigger facelifts than originally anticipated.

And if all of this sounds a little counterintuitive, just consider the price of inaction and doing nothing.

In retail, as in politics, the ‘same old same old’ just isn’t good enough.