MORE THAN half of retailers expect to lay people off in the next two months, with two-thirds of retailers rating their prospects to the end of February as poor or very poor, their representative body has said.
Retail Ireland yesterday published a survey of its members’ sentiments for 2011. The body has 3,000 members, is affiliated to Ibec and its members include department stores, electrical, fashion, shoe, grocery and specialist retailers.
The coming year would be “very challenging”, said director Torlach Denihan. The Government must start addressing issues such as too-high rents and local authority rates if it was serious about saving retail jobs.
“The strong post-Christmas sales are some badly needed good news after the 10 per cent fall in last week’s sales in comparison with the same week last year,” Mr Denihan said.
“Since the start of the recession there has been a massive fall in what customers spend but the cost of running a shop has hardly fallen at all.
“Rents, hourly wages, Repak fees and local authority charges have by and large not fallen. If Government is serious about saving jobs in the retail sector it should tackle each of these in turn,” he said.
The survey found just 3 per cent of respondents were more confident about their business than they were three months ago. Just over half (53 per cent) were less confident, with 44 per cent as confident as they were when last polled in September.
Regarding prospects for the overall business environment, 76 per cent rated them as poor, 21 per cent rated them as average and 3 per cent rated them as good.
On the sales outlook, 58 per cent expected sales to decrease over the December to February period, 26 per cent expected them to stay stable and 16 per cent expected them to increase. “This is a deterioration on the September survey,” Mr Denihan said.
