'Monsoon-like' weather has cost UK supermarkets more than £120 million (€134.5 million) in missed sales in the past four weeks, data from Nielsen has found.
Nielsen said that industry sales increased by 0.4% in the four-week period to 16 June, with cold and wet conditions causing shoppers to hold back spend and purchase fewer items than they typically would during the start of the summer.
Impact On Sales
“It’s clear that promotions, events and the vagaries of the weather have a big impact on supermarket sales," said Mike Watkins, Nielsen's UK head of retailer and business insight. "The summer trading season stretches 18 weeks from the first May bank holiday to the last week in August.
"In the first seven weeks of summer 2019, shoppers have so far spent £350 million less in supermarkets. This equates to a 2.1% fall in value sales compared to the same time period last year," he added.
Watkins added that for this year's summer to match that of last year, shoppers would need to spend an additional £26 billion over the remaining 11 weeks.
"This looks a tall order as weekly growth is currently down, and we would need a sustained heatwave through to August, as we had last summer, just for the growth at supermarkets to stand still," he said.
© 2019 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Stephen Wynne-Jones. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine.
