We’ve all seen the signs on the shop door: “One customer at a time, please.” Social distancing requirements are making trading extremely tough for the shops that have managed to stay open during the coronavirus outbreak, the smaller outlets in particular. Even larger retailers — the supermarkets, say — have had to control the numbers of shoppers coming into their stores to ensure that people can keep sufficiently far apart.
What this might mean for Greggs, the bakery chain whose smaller shops on high streets rely on large volumes of relatively small individual purchases, is not hard to imagine. Indeed, the FTSE 250 company, which shut its shops when the lockdown was imposed in late March, had to abandon an initial plan last month