Published: 7 July 2026
Summary
We talk with Chris Brook-Carter, CEO of the Retail Trust, about how retail keeps reinventing itself while still depending on emotion, relevance, and great service. We also dig into why a “plan for the high street” fails without a plan for the people, from wellbeing data and AI insights to tackling abuse with the Respect Retail campaign.
- Major retail milestones and why the pace of change accelerates
- Why consolidation does not erase the need for distinctive brands
- The emotional side of shopping and what loyalty really means
- How physical stores win through service and relevance
- What the Retail Trust does and why its mission still fits today
- Health, happiness, churn, and productivity as measurable business levers
- Using generative AI and wellbeing data to guide better people decisions
- The Retail People Index and what it reveals across roles and generations
- The scale and impact of abuse toward frontline retail workers
- Respect Retail goals: public education, free training, and post-incident support
New episodes will be dropping every two weeks, so please stay tuned.
Transcript
Host: 00:02
Welcome to What’s in the Box, brought to you by BOXTEC, powering retail with purpose. BOXTEC delivers innovative and market leading customer engagement solutions that turn business ideas into performing reality. From design and integration to ongoing support and maintenance, we’re with you every step of the way. Now, my guest today has been a passionate supporter, advocate, and champion of UK retail across his entire career. I feel privileged to have known him for a good number of years and seen the work that he does in the industry. Prior to joining Retail Trust in May 2020, he was the managing director and senior vice president of Retail Week, the most influential media brand in UK retail, and also the World Retail Congress, the single biggest gathering of global retail’s leadership each year. Before he joined Retail Week, he was a pioneer in the age of digital information, launching his first online news service in 1999 for the FMCG sector. He has edited and led a number of intelligence and information media brands in industries as diverse as agriculture and automotive, but has specialised in media brands and served consumer-facing industries all his professional life. He is a passionate campaigner for the positive impact of retail on the UK economy, as well as a leader in the fight for diversity and business, having been recognised by both the Women’s Business Council and Management Today as an agent of change by fighting for gender equality in business leadership. It is a great pleasure to welcome to What’s in The Box the CEO of the Retail Trust, Chris Brook Carter. Welcome, Chris.
Chris Brook-Carter: 01:42
Hi Andrew, thanks so much.
Host: 01:44
Thank you. As I said in the intro there, we’ve known each other for a good number of years since your days at uh the retail week. Perhaps we can talk about that for perhaps a little bit, but I really want to focus on the work that you and the Retail Trust do, because it really is amazing work that you do supporting people. And I’m sure that a lot of the audience of this will be aware, certainly of you and of the Retail Trust, but it’d be always good to just remind people what you’re up to these days. So maybe perhaps just a little bit about your days at retail week. And then we’ll talk about the Retail Trust.
Chris Brook-Carter: 02:25
Yeah. Brilliant. Yes, it’s a real pleasure to be here. Thanks so much. As your very kind, generous intro suggested, I’ve been in and around the retail industry and significantly, I suppose, its leadership for the best part of well, just over 30 years. I suppose, first as a journalist, then as a editor, and then more recently since 2020, as part of the team leading the work at the Retail Trust. So it’s been a real privilege to watch the sector change and I suppose get probably the best seats in the house in both organisations as I’ve seen it adapt and evolve to the extraordinary changes that we’ve seen over the last 20 years in particular.
Host: 03:13
Yes. I thought I kind of did a written version of a keynote that I did a few weeks ago in Stockholm. And part of it was about what I thought were the major milestones and changes in retail. And it went back to the days of Piggly Wiggly, because that was a versatile service, and then brought it up to date. And yeah, it was the internet, the world wide web, smartphone, and now AI, and it just seems to be accelerating.
Chris Brook-Carter: 03:44
Yes, absolutely. I suppose if you speak to some of the older leaders they will tell you that the only thing that’s constant in retail is change, whether it’s the move from the high street to retail parks, and big box retailing into the internet. So I think it’s always been a pretty key part of how these businesses have operated. But undoubtedly I think it has accelerated a little over the last few years and the pace with which new technologies now have the potential to change the sector again, is quite extraordinary. Obviously, we’ll wait and see whether it’s for good or bad, but certainly I feel now the sector needs to be more agile than it’s ever needed to be in the past.
Host: 04:28
Yes, and I was looking at some figures earlier again. It was a LinkedIn post from Steve Dennis, who I think you know. And he published some figures about the depth of the penetration that Amazon, Shein, Temu, Costco, Walmart. And it was something like, 60-70% in the US of all sales are from the top ten or eight retailers. And his point was, well, what room does that leave for other retailers?
Chris Brook-Carter: 05:12
Yes, but although I would say that we’ve been talking about the sort of homogenisation of the sector for so many years now, whether it was Tesco previously or Amazon, I suppose, in the UK more recently. And yet I’m still excited and passionate and inspired by how many fabulous new brands we interact with, get to meet all the time. And I remember having an argument with a former leader of mine when I was at Retail Week about the fact that I felt retail would still continue to be fragmented, that there would still be huge opportunity for great brands with a clear proposition that we weren’t all suddenly going to be trading solely on two or three huge platforms because consumers don’t want choice. They want the brands that they shop with, whether it’s general merchandise, food, drink, fashion brands, they want them to reflect themselves. And as wonderful as Amazon is, and abstractly transformational, it has been in terms of convenience, I’m not sure that anyone necessarily feels as passionate about the Amazon brand as they do, maybe to their favourite wine retailer or their favourite clothing retailer, their favourite food retailer. Those things are still incredibly emotional purchases. And so I remain pretty optimistic about the sector and its ability to evolve, and all the brands that are coming onto the market now. I’m not saying it’s easy, they face some huge challenges, but I don’t think we’re all going to be shopping in one place.
Host: 06:57
No, I agree. As you say, we don’t have that emotional attachment with an Amazon in the same way that we do our favourite brands. And I do like the fact that it seems that physical retail and reasons to go and shop, whether it be for the experience, we talk an awful lot about experiential, and I always hate the word, but we know what we mean by it. And I think that’s exciting. I think that the standard of physical retail is improving all the time. And I think Oxford Street is a classic example. I think when it gets pedestrianised, it’ll be amazing. I think it could well be an amazing place to spend time.
Chris Brook-Carter: 07:47
Yes, absolutely. And I suppose service has become more and more important. I suppose that is one of the upsides of all the pressure that we’ve seen come onto the high street. In order to survive now, you really, really need to serve your customers brilliantly. You need to understand what they want, and you need a brand and a proposition that’s going to resonate. And when I look back over the years of the brands that we wrote about and covered that have fallen by the wayside, and there’ve been some amazing ones, there is a very strong thread of a loss of relevance, to their shoppers. For some it’s been debt. I think debt and resonance have probably been the two big drivers of businesses going under since I’ve been writing and watching. But you lose your relevance at your peril these days because it is so hyper competitive, the sector, and everybody’s fighting for market share because there’s essentially no growth in the market. It hasn’t been for a number of years.
Host: 08:48
Yes. Now let’s talk about Retail Trust because it does some amazing work. I’ve kind of been involved a little bit on the periphery if you like, but for the benefit of people. Tell us about the Retail Trust. You joined, as I said in the intro, what is it six years ago? And also tell us about the challenges that you see that are, I guess, the main frontline retail workers are facing these days.
Chris Brook-Carter: 09:23
Yes, it’s an absolutely extraordinary organisation. I feel incredibly privileged to be part of it. And I’ve loved every minute of the last six years. It’s one of the oldest industry-funded charities in in the country. We’re 194 years old. And I’m always slightly wary of talking about the history because I think the danger is that the brand gets put in a box of not being progressive and forward-thinking. But actually we couldn’t be further from the truth there. I say because actually you can trace back the origins of our purpose right back to the very first meeting in the 3rd of January 1832. We have a full-page article in the Times the next day that paints the picture of who we are. And those founding trustees talked about wanting to do the three things really. The first was to campaign and champion the notion that happy, healthy people create a thriving industry, and that a thriving industry was at the heart of a thriving British society. The second was that they recognised in order to create social change around that concept, they wanted scale. And so they, at the time, talked of building out a confederacy of good feeling across the industry. We talk about coalition and an ecosystem and cultural leverage these days. And then finally, everything that they were putting in to look after people is about empowering people to take better decisions around their health. So if you fast forward almost two centuries, those three tenants still guide everything that we do. We’re out there proving the link between health and productivity, low rates of germ, low rates of absence, we want to see this sector thrive through its people. We still see the need to create leverage so that we are setting standards that everyone buys into, and that needs an ecosystem around it in order to create change. So we regularly get the sector and encourage the industry to coalesce around us on issues of people. And then everything that we’re providing is trying to empower people. Now that’s a whole range of health services, financial advice, financial support, all the way through to supported living retirement services that we provide for former retail workers. The idea that we want people to have agency over their own lives, but that agency also translates into how we support leaders within the sector as well, through a whole set of data services that gives them the information they need to make better decisions around their people, in order to create better outcomes for the business as well. So, there’s a very strong line across those almost 200 years, right back from that first meeting. And I think what inspired me about this industry more than this organisation more than anything else is that when you go back through the history of it, there are moments in time where its influence not only changes things for the retail industry, but given the importance of the retail industry to UK society, you can see its influence on British society at large. Now, one of the first benevolent societies in the country, the idea that industry looked after the people that were creating value was quite alien before we came along with a handful of other organisations at the time. There’s some extraordinary evidence to suggest that there were people running our organisation that were right at the heart of creating the working week and the weekend in the 1860s, 1870s. Our move into supporting people in retirement was pretty revolutionary at the time as well. During the late 40s, the organisation was heavily involved in rebuilding high streets up and down the country after the Blitz. But I think actually, despite all of that, despite all of those sort of progressive instincts of the leaders of this organisation in the past, for me, we’ve probably been never been more relevant than we are now to this industry. The very, very clear link between health, happiness, and lower levels of churn, high levels of productivity, we are at the cusp of being able to prove exactly what works in that space through our data. And then we’ve seen this huge rise in abuse and aggression towards retail workers up and down the country. We’re really, really encouraged by what we’re hearing from the government around its support for the high streets. It’s fabulous to have a plan for buildings and rates and all these things, but actually, currently, what’s missing is a plan for the people. And you know, high streets cannot thrive unless the people in them do. And we believe that we are the plan to do that. So we feel right at the forefront of the debate about actually how our societies and communities coalesce around high street stores and the retail sector, and think we have a big role to play in the huge good that all that can do.
Host: 14:21
That’s interesting, you’re talking about the data that you have. And because I don’t know why, clearly wrongly, I’ve always associated the Retail Trust with supporting primarily frontline workers in the stores, but clearly it’s not limited to that. And it’s fascinating that you are also supporting retail leaders by providing insights because of the data that you have.
Chris Brook-Carter: 14:47
Yes, our services now work with just under 210 of the top 230 retailers in the country, and our services cover about 700,000 of the 2.5, 3 million people working in the sector. So it is a very broad reach. And as a consequence of that, we realised a few years ago that we were sitting on enormous amounts of health data. Look, what were the trends driving people to reach out to support? What were the trends that were potentially driving absence and churn and presenteeism, which demographics were struggling more than most, or which were their pockets of happiness that we could take inspiration from to roll stuff out? We began to build a generative AI platform about three years ago that would interpret that data at a business-by-business level, score each retailer that we’re working with against a national aggregate so that they could get a sense of where they sat in the grand scheme of things, and then give insight back into those organisations actually about what initiatives do we together need to launch in order to bring churn absence and the risk to productivity down. Again, going back to why we started, is we’re here to see the sector thrive through its people and the extraordinary advances in AI and data capabilities, we’ve been able to leverage that and now sit on an extremely powerful data set that is available at a company level. But, actually also once a quarter we publish a retail people index, which took inspiration from the work the BRC do on footfall to give insight into what is actually going on with people. Because we go back to what we were talking about earlier, leaders are leading through extraordinary amounts of change, and then it’s almost impossible to do that unless you understand how your people are feeling and what their potential is, how they’re getting on with that. So we found it important to leverage that asset for the best of the sector. There are some really interesting insights, one size doesn’t fit all in this industry. We see very, very different levels of well-being and happiness at a generational level, very different from seniority, and very different depending on job role as well. And each of those cohorts needs a different level of care and a different approach and a different way of dealing with the issues they’re facing.
Host: 17:11
Yes. And I’d imagine that with retailers providing those sorts of insights, you must almost be pushing against an open door because with all the cost pressures coming on retail at the moment, they want to become more productive, more efficient, and therefore, and because I’ve always, for years and years, I’ve felt that generally retail businesses have treated their workforce, and I’m kind of referring to the frontline workforce as a cost and not an asset. But I sense that is now changing. Are you are you seeing that?
Chris Brook-Carter: 17:54
Yes, I think that’s fair. I think it’s a complex picture and there’s a lot of play. I mean the first thing is I think we saw a big pivot in COVID to understanding the role that industry can play in public health and how important a role people could play. There is a lot more societal pressure on industry and business to show that they’re running organisations that look after the mental well-being of their people. Secondly, I think that we’ve got leaders in the sector now who take this seriously because they know it’s the right thing to do. And then thirdly, clearly there is more and more evidence to show the financial link. Now we know, again, through our data, that if every colleague that is currently at risk of churning churns in the next 12 months, it will cost UK retail £7 billion in replacing them. So, as you say, when you are scrabbling around for one or two percentage point margin points on your operating model, reducing your churn and absence rate becomes a lever that actually I don’t think the sector has really lent into in the past, but actually, thanks to the data that we’re sitting on, is one that can be pulled effectively now.
Host: 19:08
Yes. Now, before we finish, we’ve got maybe a minute or two. I did want to ask you about what’s possibly your primary campaign at the moment. It started well certainly a year ago, probably longer, and that’s the Let’s Respect Retail campaign. You touched on abuse of retail workers earlier, and I think that’s one of the main topics that certainly the media picked up on. If we can just end on that, tell us a bit about that campaign.
Chris Brook-Carter: 19:37
So, I think this is certainly our most important work at the moment. 70% of all frontline colleagues say they are facing abuse in the workplace. Over 40% say it’s got so bad that they are frightened and anxious about going into work, and about a quarter suggest that it involves some physical assault as well as verbal. So this is a really important topic. A couple of years ago, well, about three years ago, we launched a campaign. Last year we pivoted quite significantly to try and leverage the message that the retail industry plays an enormous role in the health of British society, both from its ability to create a social glue in communities in High Streets, but clearly as an employer as well, particularly of young people, and therefore there is a sort of economic and moral prerogative for us, as a society, to lean into this issue. I think also that retail’s a real window into us as a nation as well. It’s you know, it’s a singular place. There are more meetings of strangers in a retail setting every single day than any other place in the country. And therefore, the importance of us reminding people of the power of kindness, the need for respect, the need for patience, I think goes beyond just what’s going on within the retail industry, and that this is a national challenge and a national problem as well. So, delighted with how the campaign’s gone. Last year we had about 300 brands get behind it, the national media got behind it, we raised significant funds to carry on doing the work this year with it. Really, the goal, I suppose, is threefold last year and this year. The first was to start educating and reminding the public of that kindness ought to be a non-negotiable on our high streets, that we all benefit if we’ve got happier, healthier high streets. That has a knock-on effect also of really throwing an arm around three million people working in this industry and saying, we’re not leaving you on your own in this. Actually, this is an industry and a society that will work hard for you to start changing, turning the tide on this problem. Secondly, that actually we have a whole host of brilliant free training modules that are available on our website, and we want to get those into the hands of as many frontline colleagues as possible so they’ve got the confidence and the skills to deal better with these challenging situations. And we know when colleagues feel supported, they feel seen, and they feel heard, their resilience goes up considerably compared to those that feel like they’re dealing with this stuff in a vacuum. And then finally, we recognise we’re probably uniquely placed to then offer a pathway of support to colleagues post-incident. So whether they need to speak to someone, whether they need to go back into the micro learnings to just give themselves a boost of confidence, whether they need to do CBT around sleep or anxiety to help with some of the stress of this, actually, that there’s a whole pathway of support available as well. So, really for me, whilst we had brilliant momentum last year, it is kicking on significantly now, Andrew. We’ve got the police involved, we’ve got local councils involved, the home office are interested. And, as I say, there’s this great plan coming down the road, to help regenerate high streets from a building and an infrastructure point of view. We cannot forget about the people in this plan. This campaign is the industry’s chance, I think, to address that en masse for an industry to have a single platform, a single language to say to customers, please remember kindness matters, and to say to colleagues, look, we care and we’ve got your back on this.
Host: 23:16
Yes, absolutely. And I wish you all the best with that campaign. Chris, that’s been brilliant. Thank you so much.
Chris Brook-Carter: 23:19
My pleasure.
Host: 23:20
So that’s all we’ve got time for What’s in The Box for now. New episodes will be dropping every two weeks, so please stay tuned. And if you want to find out more about BOXTEC, please follow the link in the description. Thanks for listening.