The decision by John Lewis bosses to close flagship stores in cities like Aberdeen may be something they live to regret, according to a Scottish retail scholar.
Professor Leigh Sparks, a lecturer in retail studies at Stirling University, voiced concern over the move by the high street giant to offload “big core sites” across the UK – and called on John Lewis to have a “rethink”.
But Prof Sparks said, despite the loss of John Lewis, a post-pandemic surge in high street footfall could energise city centres once more.
He said: “If you think about department stores and you think about the cities that have got them, they are really big core sites within the city centre and they have big heritage around them – so there is that thing about them being an asset that certain places have.
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“Often they were a sense of local pride, but that heritage has been lost over time.
“There is a cost structure issue around big stores, clearly, but I think as people want to go back shopping and want to be out with people after what we’ve lived through over the last year, I think places and high streets are going to be more important.
“John Lewis might, in the end, have to rethink what might be the right way of doing things.
“I do wonder whether they are going to regret some of these moves in the next few years.”
Bosses at John Lewis cited issues around stores that cannot be “substantially improved” as a reason behind the decision and pointed to a rapidly increasing online market.
Prof Sparks said a “combination of circumstances” would have factored these into the move.
“The difficulty in looking at this from the outside is that we don’t really know the cost structure that John Lewis has in particular store, such as the rates and operation costs”, he added.
“All of that factors into what the sales and trade are. A lot of that has been damaged over the last 12 months.
“Aberdeen suffers a bit because the perception is of oil and gas and all the rhetoric that it has gone through some bad times – it is also a smaller city and doesn’t have the draw of Glasgow or Edinburgh.
“Having said that, it does have a draw over a larger region, which I thought would have counted for it.”