If it has been a bad Christmas on the high street, someone appears not to have told the specialist property companies that own regional shopping centres. Intu, the company formerly known as Capital Shopping Centres, had some decent enough figures out the other day. Now along comes Capital & Regional with a positive trading statement, like-for-like footfall up by 2.2 per cent in the last two weeks of the year over the same period in 2015.
This does not necessarily mean that those customers coming into its shopping centres are spending more than they were the previous year. The indications so far are that the supermarkets may have done rather better than had been thought and specialist retailers such as Next may have fared worse.