Non-food retail in Europe declines by 3 per cent

Although 2020, year of the coronavirus, presented retailers with an immense challenge,retailers of day-to-day essentials benefited from the fact that public life wound down during lockdown.
The 27 EU states recorded an increase of 5.5 per cent in sales on average. Non-food retail, on the other hand, saw a decline in sales of 3.0 per cent across the EU. These are the results of an extensive survey of retail in Europe recently published by the market research company GfK.
The biggest downturns in sales of non-essential items were recorded in Italy (-11.6 per cent), Spain (-11.0 per cent) and Cyprus (-10.8 per cent). Sales of clothing and footwear in particular were down in many countries, in some cases by over 20 per cent. In the Netherlands, however, non-food retail sales increased significantly overall (+6.2 per cent). Unlike in many other European states, retailers were not obliged to close here in the first wave of Covid and online retail grew comparatively strongly. In Lithuania too (+7.7 per cent) and Denmark (+6.2 per cent), 2020 saw a big increase in sales of non-food items compared with the previous year.
The study also showed that in retailing of technical consumer goods, omnichannel retailers exhibited a faster pace of growth than pure online players.