Pop to the shops
When shoppers turned away from supermarkets for fear of catching Covid in the aisles, Ocado chief executive Tim Steiner proclaimed that grocery shopping had “changed for good”.
It’s true that the pandemic accelerated the adoption of buying groceries online — a feat that Steiner has spent two decades striving to achieve — but it turns out plenty of consumers are returning to doing their weekly food shop the old-fashioned way.
Online grocery sales roughly doubled to account for 15.1 per cent of the market by February 2021, and they might well have been even higher if supermarkets had the infrastructure to cope with the additional demand. But they have since fallen back to make up 11.5 per cent of the market, according to data provider Kantar.
The city and commuting
Worker footfall in city centres has recovered strongly in the past year, albeit not on Mondays and Fridays.
Data from Transport for London suggests there has been a surge in workers returning to the office in central London since September, despite a spate of train and Tube strikes.
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“Passengers coming out of Tube stations in the City are now about 80 per cent of pre-Covid levels on Thursdays — the most popular day — up from about 60 per cent in March,” said Paul Swinney at the Centre for Cities think tank. “It’s not clear yet whether we will ultimately get back to pre-Covid trends, but we shouldn’t be surprised if ... the world of work looks much more like it did ...than many were somewhat naively predicting in 2020.”
Road traffic is above 90 per cent of 2019 levels, with bus use outside London at 81 per cent, according to the Department for Transport. Rail journeys nationwide had climbed to 86 per cent of their pre-Covid levels by the start of December, although powered by leisure travel; there has been less commuting.
Dining delight
Along with travel, pubs and restaurants were hit hardest by Covid lockdowns, but the expectation was that pent-up demand would come roaring back as soon as social distancing was dropped. This has been borne out by data from booking platform OpenTable, which recorded that the number of seated diners in December was above its 2019 level — the data may be slightly skewed by the fact that more restaurants now require guests to reserve in advance. But this is an industry that still has plenty of pressures on its plate, and the end of lockdowns has not helped as much as it might have done.
“Just at the point where recovery from Covid was in our sights, rocketing energy costs, the cost of living crisis, the rising cost of doing business, workforce challenges and now rail strikes are taking their toll on businesses in the sector,” said Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality. She called for “root and branch reform” of the business rates system to help firms “trade to their full potential”.
Cashing out
When coronavirus struck, customers and retailers shunned notes and coins out of fear that they could spread the virus. With the surge in contactless spending, there were suggestions that cash might fall out of use.
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Data from the cash machine network Link shows that withdrawals from its ATMs are down 40 per cent compared to before the pandemic, and trade body UK Finance estimates that cash will comprise just 6 per cent of transactions by 2031.
The decline in ready money looks set to be one of the more profound changes wrought by Covid — but this risks leaving some people behind, said Link boss John Howells, who noted that some households still use cash to help, for example, with budgeting. He welcomes forthcoming legislation in the Financial Services and Markets bill to ringfence access to cash.
Holidays
Covid brought the holiday industry to a halt, but since travel restrictions were eased last March, demand has come roaring back: almost twice as many people travelled abroad between March and August as in the previous six months, according to trade body Abta.
The proportion of British holidaymakers who opted for a foreign holiday last year jumped to 45 per cent, from just 16 per cent the year before. This is still some way short of the 64 per cent who jetted overseas in 2019.
But holidaymakers do not seem to be taking any chances with their long-awaited breaks, with Abta reporting a 36 per cent jump in the number of people using a travel agent to book their trips, compared with before the pandemic.
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Customers are keeping a close eye on value, too. For 2023, Abta noted “a significant rise in all-inclusive breaks and people choosing to book earlier than normal in order to lock in the best price for their trip”.
