Footfall Insights September 2025

They actually dipped by 4.8% from August last year , which is a bit disappointing because in July they were only 1.4% below last year . So it seemed to be getting better . But August took a bit of a dip . Fashion took another hit , as did general retail .

General retail is a mixture of stores and they include department stores , but also the discounters you know B&M , home Bargains , that sort of stuff , so that sales in those retailers dropped by 7.6% . So it wasn't a great August , to be fair .

But every cloud has a silver lining and whilst the reason for the fall was a dropping transactions rather than customers , so the customers actually were about level for last year , so that's a number of unique customers buying , which is good . So that mirrored the footfall data .

People were actually buying fewer , so they were making less transactions , so they were just very cautious . But those who did purchase their transactions that were made , the average transaction value rose slightly , so bought fewer items or made fewer purchases , but actually spent a bit more on what they did buy .

I mean , certainly , if you focus on the UK , we've got budget coming

up . I think we said it was November when we were doing some research offline . There's quite a bit of uncertainty around that isn't there , of you know , taxes , of what's going to happen to certain things with stamp duty or not , unemployment's taken a bit of a spike , amp duty or not , unemployment's taking a bit of a spike .

We did productivity forum a couple of weeks ago . We ran it through a load of the , the models , gemini and all the others and they were predicting it's going to continue to rise to kind of mid-late 2025 , 2026 , sorry , and then drop off , so that that's not great .

Clearly , there's donald's still still around and , unfortunately , ukraine war is still around , so there's loads of stuff going on , isn't there ?

Which is produced every quarter and it's lagged by a quarter , so it's a bit out of date . But quarter one , 2025 , the savings ratio is sort of the highest it's been since covid and , excluding covid , it's the highest it's been since the recession in 2009 , 2010 . So people are stashing money away .

Then they feel nervous , they feel cautious , so they're not spending unnecessarily and being profitably good , they're saving for a rainy day and also , you know , they're not spending unnecessarily and being profitably good , they're saving for a rainy day .

And also , the housing market is always a good barometer of confidence , I always think , because when people feel confident in their employment , they feel confident in the economy , they feel ready to make what can be the most significant move for anyone in their entire life .

And house price index is a relatively poor indicator of what's happening because it's dependent on what houses are up for sale , which doesn't actually show demand . But if you look at the number of mortgages granted last year , in last August they rose by 15.5% from August 24 . This August they've dropped by 2.4% . So people are just not taking new mortgages out .

They are being very , very resistant to making that enormous move because they just don't know what's around the corner . And that shows in the GFK Consumer Confidence their latest numbers , which actually are for September but are published mid-month . They've dropped back again to the July level of minus 19 .

So we're not seeing any improvement in consumer confidence at all .

So we've got this balance of high costs higher than desirable interest rates , which is great if you're saving , but not if you're borrowing . Unemployment that is higher than people want it to be .

And people feel vulnerable at their jobs because , as we talked about in previous months , the NI changes have meant a lot of organizations have streamlined their workforce yeah and I don't , and I might be doing people listening to this service . I don't know for those people that don't see payroll figures if they really grasp how big a deal that is

no , they probably don't actually , and I think I mean , you have some really good take on that , you know , and I think people don't really realize how big it is , even for a small business , even for me . I'm a one-man consultant , it hit me , you know so yeah , it cost it .

Actually , if my biggest customer has an attack and I lose business over the next year , what am I going to do ? You know , contingency plans have been put into place which hit everyone .

Then we're black friday , cyber monday week month to christmas , then clearly we're at christmas , so I know you've been doing some thinking about what what the quarter four forecast might look like . Is there anything you can share ?

So if you had a very strong comparable in the previous year , it's unlikely unless anything like we've gone into boom condition that we're going to carry on that trend .

Likewise , if it was very poor last year , you're more likely to have a better number this year and I think every retailer in the world knows that , and that's the upside of having poor results in the previous year . So last year we had not a positive October , but it wasn't too bad . So I'm anticipating this October is going to be worse than last year .

So I'm saying that we're looking at a drop in sales . Minus 3% In November was strong last year . I don't know if anyone remembers , but Black Friday was a really , really successful period .

Of course , it's not just a day , it's a week now and actually black friday itself led to a sales increase in the history of 15 and a half percent annually , which is amazing . This year I'm I'm seeing that I'm forecasting that november will be one percent down on last year , because it was about two percent up last year .

Likewise , december was a disaster . I think it was recognised that that boom that we'd hoped would happen in the last week or two didn't happen and sales were down by nearly 8% . So I'm actually forecasting an increase in sales this year in December of 1.5% . I mean , it's not amazing but it is a positive change .

So we shall see how it starts to pan out , because you can never anticipate At the moment it's very difficult to anticipate what's going to happen economically and you know December will depend on , I think , what happens in the budget at the end of November how people feel .

But yeah , I think there's a lot riding in november , certainly from probably a business point of view , if they touch business rates or even vat I'm hypothesizing here , but that that could be significant yeah , it all is .

And there were five , ten grand a year there and everywhere to sign on . Yeah , that's completely flipped now . So hence unemployment's going up and that nervousness . So not maybe a great avenue to turn the corner into the fourth quarter and that golden period for lots of organizations .

But and we say every time , don't , there's still loads to play for , there's still money out there . There's this as a consumer . There's some great offers . Be really interesting to see how the , the big multiples and the supermarkets go from Black Friday through to Christmas . It could be a play into consumers' hands , with it being a buyer's market .

the drop that we've seen in clothing sales , that drop is becoming smaller . It's improved over the last sort of eight months . So fashion isn't as bad as it was . At the same time , food and drink is still very , very strong . It's 25% of town centre sales now .

Food and drink , followed by food , then followed by fashion and health and beauty , was still only about 9-10% of total sales in town centres . You know we've seen strong increases in health and beauty in the high streets .

So people are going into stores to buy health and beauty and it's not just buying the products , it's , you know , the gyms and the nail bars and you know all of that self-care element is really , really strong .

So there's lots of opportunities for retailers to climb on the back of that and to get some gains excellent lots to play for positive news for the next couple of months , hopefully .