Supermarkets in city centres are more likely to be closed down in the future, as compared to the ones on the edge of town, says a recently-published research.
According to investment advisor Atrato Capital, town centre sites are less suitable locations for retailers as they will be competing against increase in online orders. As such, many of them could face closure, while some players will open out-of-town branches elsewhere.
Some of the town centre sites are already under “threat” as trading transfers from physical-only stores to online ones, states the research.
“Large town-centre supermarkets are not ideal because it’s very hard to do online from them and obviously it’s harder and harder for people to drive their cars to them,” said principal Ben Green.
“If you take a typical regional town, with a ring road and arterial roads running in and out, the ones that work are on an arterial road, so you’ve got easy access to deliver to a large population both inside and outside the town.”
The research adds that store-picking is the future of online grocery, claiming it is more profitable than fulfilling orders directly from warehouses.
The findings came a month after another which pointed out how city centres witnessed a huge drop in footfall and thus were the worst hit as compared to suburbs and towns.
As per figures from Cities Outlook 2022, places like Oxford, Newcastle or Cambridge which before Covid-19 had relatively low numbers of empty shops on their high streets saw more closures than cities like Blackpool, Bradford or Doncaster, where the increase in vacancy rates was much more muted.
