Martin Lewis' tips for saving money on Christmas shopping

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The death of the high street may be on its way as new report shows vast amounts of consumers flocking online this Christmas. For the first time ever, Londoners have spent more online than on the high street, according to an analysis by the personal lender Abound, which analysed the transactions of its users through Open Banking software. One high street expert spoke exclusively to Express.co.uk and explained the trend.

The company found a 16.5 percent increase in the amount of Londoners purchasing online between November and December 2022 with more people spending with companies like Amazon and ASOS rather than hitting the high street.

Gerald Chappell, CEO of Abound, says the trend neatly coincides with the rise of train strikes and cold weather, which could be reducing footfall in high streets.

He said: “The spike in Londoners turning to online shopping up to December has been steep and sudden. But it coincided with Black Friday, the train strikes, and the cold weather, all of which combined might have led to more people choosing to shop from the comfort of their home.

“Meanwhile outside the capital, it continues to be the case that high streets remain more popular, especially during the holiday season, where they serve as social and leisure hubs as well as retail centres.”

According to Kate Nicholls OBE, Chief Executive of Hospitality UK, which represents hundreds of businesses from across the hospitality sector, the high street took a massive blow over Covid, which it hasn’t recovered from.

She thinks the rise of working from home and hybrid working are the main culprits.

Ms Nicholls told Express.co.uk: “People haven’t come back in the same numbers and volumes that you saw pre-covid. That’s partly a sort of shift to hybrid working and at home working which means that footfall is down in those towns and city centres.

“That has a knock on impact on the viability of of high street businesses be they retail or hospitality. Because they all co-exist so if you’re not getting people coming in to shop then they might not come and eat and drink at the same time and vise versa.

“So people are not eating and drinking out. They don’t spend as long in shops and they don’t spend as much. So, the high street is a quite delicate ecosystem and we really need policies to really rejuvinate and help support high street recovery.”

She also claimed high business rates were crippling brick and mortar businesses across the UK, and called for an end to what she described as the “cost of business” crisis.

Ms Nicholls added: “Obviously there is the issue of business rates and that’s part of the reason the high street finds it hard to compete [with online] because cost of doing business on the high street is higher, both for retail and hospitality.

“This means they’re paying disproportionally more in property taxes than online counterparts and that’s an additional cost in the business.

“Unless you’ve got root and branch reform of business rates you’re always going to have bricks and mortar at a disadvantage to clicks and mortar.”

But overall, Ms Nicholls remains optimistic the high street can survive an increasingly online retail sector.

When asked if she thought the death of the high street was inevitable, she replied: “I don’t think it’s inevitable.

“People do want to come out in person. I don’t think it’s inevitable but while we’ve got a cost of living crisis and a cost of doing business crisis we need to everything we can to make sure we keep prices low for the consumer and that means cutting the cost of doing business.”

The analysis by Abound also found that as high inflation continues to squeeze incomes, individuals the do still shop in person are moving towards cheaper stores to save on day-to-day spending.

The company’s research found that spending at discount stores has increased by 12 percent, compared to spending around the same time last year.

It found them opting for stores such as Poundland, Lidl and Aldi compared to supermarket stores like Sainsburys, Waitrose and Tesco.

Their findings are based on an anonymised sample of 50,000 people who use Open Banking through Abound’s platform. The analysis was undertaken in December 2022 looking back over a 12-month period.

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