This week, shopping malls from France to Indonesia asked customers to show digital vaccination records in order to enter. Are vaccine mandates good for retailers?
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This week, shopping malls from Paris to Jakarta asked customers to show digital vaccination records in order to enter, as governments imposed new rules designed to slow the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant while enabling the resumption of normal life.
For fashion retailers around the world, vaccine mandates come with pros and cons.
Retailers are eager to get shoppers back to physical stores, which are uniquely powerful as stages for brand experience and where consumers typically spend more per visit than online, often at better margins. And anything that makes shoppers feel safer is likely to help.
In recent months, stores have seen a resurgence in foot traffic after more than a year of intermittent closures, but retailers may again suffer if the spread of the Delta strain isn’t contained. Already new outbreaks have hurt retail sales from China to the United Kingdom.
“Traffic is coming back to stores, but it’s a moving target,” said retail consultant Robert Burke. “Everyone wants to create a safe environment for customers.”
Ensuring the safety of employees is another key concern, especially at a time when frontline retail workers are in high demand and retailers are under pressure to show greater interest in their well-being. Here, too, vaccination requirements can help.
But despite the benefits, vaccine mandates come with plenty of complications.
For a start, there’s the logistical challenge. While countries like France and Italy have swiftly adopted digital health passes, many major markets still lack the technology infrastructure for retailers to accurately and efficiently check vaccination status.
Vaccines are also highly polarising, especially in the United States, where the population is deeply divided into those who favour inoculation and those who are “anti-vax.” The country’s federal and state governments have yet to impose mandates, leaving retailers to contend with the issue alone. This presents a particularly thorny problem for large retail chains with customers on both sides of the political fault line.
What if consumers resist? With contentious mask mandates, enforcement typically falls to sales associates who lack sufficient training and suffer abuse when asking customers to comply, driving them to quit at a time when retail workers are already in short supply. Vaccine mandates come with similar liabilities.
“Whatever a brand can do to make people feel more safe and secure and protected is vitality important,” said retail guru and BoF columnist Doug Stephens. “Vaccination is a relatively practical health and safety issue, like wet floors are a health and safety issue. But where things begin to break down is enforcement.”
Government regulation can help to push things forward, taking a difficult decision out of the hands of retailers while empowering them to implement it.
It’s telling that in most countries, governments, not retailers, have made the first move.
“Retailers are hesitant,” said Burke. “It’s only going to happen when governments mandate it. If governments had a requirement, many retailers would be happy. And they would have the right to enforce it.”