SHOPPERS have been left devastated and shocked after a popular town centre health store closed down.
The Vitamin Shop in Watford is said to have been shuttered for a month now, without explanation as to why.
The health and fitness supplement store has had its fixtures and fitting stripped out for refurbishment.
With no announcement made on social media, the store has been listed as permanently closed on Google.
There are expectations a new business will move in soon.
The unit and its two-bedroom flat upstairs were made available for rent together at £27,000 per year earlier in the week.
Th property therefore has a value of £50 per square foot of the, which is rateable at £6,900.
Managed by Perry Holt Property Consultants, the property is described to be “prominently located”.
It sits on a major thoroughfare in a “well-established area for secondary retailers”.
Closure of the Vitamin Shop is among many retailers around the UK that have stopped their operations.
Another supplements store, a Holland & Barrett branch in Stoke on Trent, also closed down earlier in the year.
This similarly caused devastation for shoppers in the local community, with one who took to social media and wrote: “It’s all over.”
According to a report by the Centre for Retail Research, an average of 37 high street shops closed every day across the UK last year.
On top of that, the Centre for Retail Research has warned that “worse is set to come in 2025”.
Why are retailers closing stores?
RETAILERS have been feeling the squeeze since the pandemic, while shoppers are cutting back on spending due to the soaring cost of living crisis.
High energy costs and a move to shopping online after the pandemic are also taking a toll, and many high street shops have struggled to keep going.
However, additional costs have added further pain to an already struggling sector.
The British Retail Consortium has predicted that the Treasury’s hike to employer NICs from April will cost the retail sector £2.3billion.
At the same time, the minimum wage will rise to £12.21 an hour from April, and the minimum wage for people aged 18-20 will rise to £10 an hour, an increase of £1.40.
The Centre for Retail Research (CRR) has also warned that around 17,350 retail sites are expected to shut down this year.
It comes on the back of a tough 2024 when 13,000 shops closed their doors for good, already a 28% increase on the previous year.
Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the CRR said: “The results for 2024 show that although the outcomes for store closures overall were not as poor as in either 2020 or 2022, they are still disconcerting, with worse set to come in 2025.”
It comes after almost 170,000 retail workers lost their jobs in 2024.
End-of-year figures compiled by the Centre for Retail Research showed the number of job losses spiked amid the collapse of major chains such as Homebase and Ted Baker.
It said its latest analysis showed that a total of 169,395 retail jobs were lost in the 2024 calendar year to date.
This was up 49,990 – an increase of 41.9% – compared with 2023.
It is the highest annual reading since more than 200,000 jobs were lost in 2020 in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced retailers to shut their stores during lockdowns.
The centre said 38 major retailers went into administration in 2024, including household names such as Lloyds Pharmacy, Homebase, The Body Shop, Carpetright and Ted Baker.
Around a third of all retail job losses in 2024, 33% or 55,914 in total, resulted from administrations.
Experts have said small high street shops could face a particularly challenging 2025 because of Budget tax and wage changes.
Professor Bamfield has warned of a bleak outlook for 2025, predicting that as many as 202,000 jobs could be lost in the sector.
“By increasing both the costs of running stores and the costs on each consumer’s household it is highly likely that we will see retail job losses eclipse the height of the pandemic in 2020.”