Finally, in a horrible week for Rachel Reeves which has seen inflation surge, the public finances take a dive and her authority undermined by Angela Rayner’s memo and the Prime Minister’s U-turn on the winter fuel payment, a glimmer of good news. Retail sales rose by 1.2 per cent in April. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) did, however, revise down March’s figure from 0.4 per cent growth to 0.1 per cent. The quarterly figures, which are more reliable, show that sales volumes were up 1.8 per cent between February and April.

There is now a clear trend. Retail sales volumes bottomed out in December 2023 and have been generally rising since then. However, to underline just how damaging Covid was for the retail sector, sales volumes have only just, this month, surpassed the level they were in February 2020, on the eve of the pandemic. If you are a retailer, you have only recently emerged from a four-year recession. Given the growth in population since 2020, the retail industry has not yet fully recovered from the slump

The limitations of online retailing, perhaps, are beginning to bite

In April, sales volumes were especially strong in food. This may, however, contain a warning. While the ONS has suggested that the sunny weather in April might have contributed to the rise, an alternative explanation is that people might be buying more food in supermarkets because they are eating out less – which may be a sign of people drawing in their horns. This particular set of figures cannot shed light on that.

There is another trend which is worthy of comment. During the pandemic, online retailers, for obvious reasons, enjoyed a boom. They were already doing well, but Covid seemed to put rocket-boosters under the shift towards online sales. It became fashionable to say that Covid had brought a whole decade’s worth of changes in the retail industry in just a few months. Yet unexpectedly – at least to some people – that trend has now gone into reverse. The value of online sales in April fell 1 per cent in clothing and 1.5 per cent in household goods.

The limitations of online retailing, perhaps, are beginning to bite. Most of all is the problem of being unable to see the quality of the product. This might not be an issue for repeat purchases, but if you are shopping around for something new, or it is an item of clothing that you need to try on, it is difficult. Online shoppers tend to get around this by buying stuff and then sending it back if they don’t like it. But the retailers themselves are steadily trying to erect barriers to make it more difficult to return goods.

I have long thought that one’s own experiences are very important to understanding the economy – on the basis that if you are thinking something, there is a strong likelihood that others are, too. I have been doing quite a lot of online retailing recently, for one reason and another, and it has been a sometimes agonising experience.

Several items which looked good in the photos were a lot less so in the flesh. A coffee table arrived broken and took several weeks – and numerous emailed photographs – to get it returned. A garden table arrived with its glass broken. The retailer insisted that they would need to replace the whole table, not just the glass. It took a fortnight to arrange the collection of the table, but when a replacement was sent the next day, it contained only the glass – I had to wait another week for the table to be sent back.

For people who are not at home most of the time, online shopping can be a disaster. One thing which may be affecting the sector is the trend against working from home. Online retailing, I am sure, is here to stay. But the latest retail sales figures are a sign that it is finding its level, just as its forerunner, catalogue shopping, had to do.