This is certainly bad news for high street businesses. They have had seven months now of low sales. Last month, alone, the year-on-year sales fell by 1.5%, according to the BDO monthly High Street Sales Tracker. Sales of clothes dropped by 3.3% last month and by 9.6% in the last week alone; homeware sales, however, rose by 11.3% which is the strongest showing they’ve had since April of 2016.
Lifestyle goods sales which include software was up by .7% last month. This was helped by the Rio Olympics. As Sophie Michael, the head of retail and wholesale for BDO said, retailers had “failed to put last summer’s woes behind them and deliver a positive story for 2016.”
Interestingly, Barclaycard said that spending in pubs was up by 13.3% last month and restaurants had a 12.7% increase.