Gloom pervades the high street as sales plunge

Published on Friday 28 November 2008 20:30

HIGH Street sales plunged at a record rate last month, new figures from the CBI yesterday revealed, capping a torrid week for Britain's beleaguered shopkeepers.

The gloomy tone of the business body's quarterly distributive trades survey chimed with dreary sales data from retail bellwether John Lewis.

For the ninth week in a row, year-on-year sales were down at the partnership's 27 department stores.

Double-digit declines at all three Scottish branches – in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen – contributed to a group-wide slump of 13.3 per cent.

The CBI survey showed that the balance of retailers reporting that sales were up year-on-year dived to -46 in November, from -27 a month earlier, much worse than the drop to -35 economists had forecast.

The index was last this low in August, which was the weakest reading since the series began in 1983.

Howard Archer, chief UK economist at IHS Global Insight, described the result as "awful", saying it added to the "litany of bad news coming from the high street".

He added: "We suspect that there will be a lot more discounting, special promotions and flash sales right up to Christmas to try and get hard-pressed consumers to spend."

In a further sign of the woes facing Britain's retailers, the owner of the Fads, Leveys and Texstyle World furnishing stores yesterday reported wider half-year losses and said it was finding it difficult to reposition the business in the "value for money" sector.

Strategic Retail said the recent deterioration in sales had been especially acute in its larger out-of-town Texstyle World stores, where trading was 11 per cent down on a like-for-like basis in the six months to August.

Amid the carnage, hopes were raised yesterday that at least some Woolworths stores could be rescued after food retailer Iceland confirmed its interest in buying sites from the administrator of the collapsed chain. Deloitte, which is hunting for a buyer for the business or its stores, has received approaches from a number of parties about the 813-store retail chain and the firm's EUK wholesaling arm.

• Retail tycoon Sir Philip Green has made a profit of just over 1m after offloading his 28 per cent stake in menswear chain Moss Bros.

Green, who ruled out a takeover bid for Moss Bros on Thursday just two weeks after snapping up the stake, has sold the holding to Simon Berwin, head of Leeds-based suitmaker Berwin & Berwin.