A new Local Data Company report claims that the number of empty shops on UK high streets is set to rise in 2012.

The report forecasts that the number of empty stores will increase and puts this trend down to a number of factors including weak consumer confidence, the growth in online shopping and the expansion of the supermarket sector.

Whilst shop vacancy rates stabilised in 2011 at 14.3%, there are now some 48,000 empty shops on the UK’s various high streets.

This report also highlighted large regional differences in 2011. The best performing centres were found mainly in the South and West, whilst the worst were to be found in the North and Midlands.

The region with the lowest rate of emptying stores was St Albans in the South, with a vacancy rate of 9%, whilst the North West’s town of Stockport had the highest rate at over 30%. Other North West locations with vacancy rates of more than 25% were Blackburn, Blackpool, Grimsby, Nottingham, Stockton, Wolverhampton, and Walsall.

Matthew Hopkinson, director at the Local Data Company, said: “The stable top line rate of 2011 hides the significant breadth in town centre vacancy rates up and down the country. The odds are stacked against a positive take-up of shops and as such the new reality of 48,000 empty shops is here to stay unless an alternative use or purpose can be found.”

Commenting on the figures, Stephen Robertson, director general of the British Retail Consortium said: “The scale of retail failures since Christmas and number of shops standing empty show the effects of high costs and weak demand on retail businesses and the people and places that rely on them.”

Baby Mothercare has announced that it will be collaboraing with Jools Oliver on a range of children’s clothing and nursery accessories.

Author and wife of TV chef Jamie, Jools will be launching the collection later on in the year, with the products expected to arrive in Mothercare stores across the UK and internationally in August.

The mother-of-four will be designing a whole host of clothing and accessories aimed at babies, toddlers and children up to five years. The range will include clothing, bedding, nursery accessories and gift sets.

According to Mothercare, the Jools Oliver range will be eclectic, and will reflect her love of collectables that are as modern as they are nostalgic. It also emphasised that the Jools Oliver collection would be available at affordable prices.

Speaking about her new project, Oliver said: “I have such a passion for the design of children’s clothes so to have this opportunity to work for Mothercare is amazing. The entire collection has been lovingly put together and accessibly priced for parents.”

Mothercare executive chairman Alan Parker said: “For the past 50 years Mothercare has stood for a modern approach to traditional family values and we believe this complements all that Jools Oliver stands for.”

French Connection, the fashion brand, has issued a profits warning for the second time in less than three months.

After a less than successful Christmas trading period, the company expects to announce profits for the year to 31 January 2012 as low as £4.7million. This, they expect due to poor trading over the Christmas period.

The first French Connection profits warning occurred just two months ago in November 2011, when the fashion retailer warned that retail sales were running 9.5% lower than November 2010. As a result, retail analysts cut profit forecasts to around £7.8million.

A French Connection statement read: “Trading in our retail stores in UK/Europe was disappointing in the early part of the autumn/winter season and this continued through the Christmas trading period.

“The effect of this has been to negate the growth in like-for-like sales achieved in the first half of the year and to cause the gross margin to be lower than expected.”

There was some good news for French Connection, however, with wholesale deliveries showing growth in the second half of the year, and forward orders for the Spring/Summer Season also improving on the previous year. The company also claim that its international operations and brand licensing partners continued to perform strongly.

The company suffered losses in 2009 and 2010 but returned to profitability last year following a restructur and the sales of its Nicole Farhi brand.

The mobile revolution is in full swing, and a whopping 73% of consumers now access websites on a mobile device, yet just 20% of companies have a mobile optimised site.

An EPiServer study proves that the majority of UK companies are failing to meet consumer expectations for mobile website browsing. The research found that just 20% of companies have a mobile optimised site in place and an incredible 49% of UK consumers experience frustration with the mobile sites already in place.

It wasn’t all bad news, however, with expectations for an increasingly mobile future. According to the study, as many as 76% of marketers say they have a mobile strategy in place, while 26% expect their mobile optimised site to be launched in the next year.

Mobile device usage is soaring, and two thirds of consumers have accessed a mobile app in the past year, but it isn’t all plain sailing and 32% of respondents surveyed said they find mobile websites hard to navigate, 35% admitted that if a mobile website is difficult to use, they will drop off.

Nearly half of the mobile device using population find these applications to be slow and over a third find logging in to be difficult.

Maria Wasing, VP of Marketing Europe & Sales Operations at EPiServer, commented,” Our research clearly highlights the increasing importance of an effective mobile strategy in order to attract new customers and to effectively serve existing ones.

“The number of consumers carrying an internet-enabled device with them at all times is rocketing and, by thinking about the best approach for your brand now, businesses can make the most of the growing mobile opportunity.”

Research has found that lengthy queues for checkouts in retail stores is costing British businesses over 21 million potential customers every year.

Market research company YouGov conducted an online survey amongst UK adults to detemine whether long queues hindered retailers’ abilities to make sales, and how consumers thought retailers should go about reducing the amount of time spent queuing in-store.

The study found that 59 per cent of shoppers were not prepared to wait in a queue in order to make a purchase. Furthermore, when faced with a queue in store, 32 per cent said they would then turn to an online retailer, while 18 per cent would visit an alternative store.

When asked what they thought was causing the long queues, a massive 89 per cent of shopper placed the blame on retailers not hiring enough staff to handle the demand. Another explanation, according to 23 per cent of shoppers, was that various payment methods were too time-consuming.

YouGov retail consulting director Rob Cushen said: “This research shows that a significant number of shoppers turn their backs on a high street shop if the queues are too long. The problem for traditional bricks and mortar retailers is that these same people will then go online and once there, they prefer online specialists like Amazon.

“This is a huge lost opportunity for the high street. The solution is not to increase the number of staff to handle queues at peak times but the smart use of technology.”

High street health and beauty retailer Superdrug has announced that it will be recruiting 800 new apprentices throughout its network over the next 12 months.

The recruitment drive has been launched in support of National Apprenticeship Week, which has been organised by the National Apprenticeship Service and starts on 6th February. The aim of National Apprenticeship Week is to celebrate the talents of apprentices across the country, and how much value they offer to all level of employers.

Established in 2007, Superdrug’s apprenticeship scheme has so far welcomed over 700 apprentices, and give employees the opportunity to develop their personal skills and build up confidence, as well as gaining a nationally recognised qualification.

The programme will be open to all Superdrug employees who have worked at the company for more than three months, and work at least 16 hours a week, meaning workers can “learn while they earn”.

Superdrug HR Director Jo Mackie said: “Superdrug is a people business and we know our success depends on the skills of everyone who works for us. Our Team Academy training programme offers colleagues the confidence and skills they need to expand their learning and further their career.

“We’re delighted to continue to support apprenticeships and see the results of the training every day in our stores, head office and distribution centres.”

Toy retailer The Entertainer has raised over £100,000 from customer donations using an electronic charity box scheme.

Using the Pennies electronic charity box, customers have donated their “small change” from transactions made by credit or debit cards in-store, or through purchases made online, replacing the traditional penny boxes that were commonplace next to tills in shops and food outlets.

Through the Pennies scheme, over 350,000 individual donations have been made by The Entertainer customers, with a peak in the week before Christmas where over £13,000 was donated.

The majority of the funds raised by The Entertainer will be donated to four children’s hospitals; Liverpool’s Alder Hey Imagine Appeal, Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity and Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Appeal, which fundraises for Bristol Children’s Hospital.

The rest of the money will be shared amongst ten charities covering a range of different causes, including cancer patients, the elderly and education.

The Entertainer is the first high street chain to adopt the scheme, and they found that over half of customers who were asked to donate chose to do so.

Gary Grant, managing director of The Entertainer, said: “People are inclined to be generous, and we have provided this very simple option for them to easily donate their small change. It has been amazing to see how those micro-donations add up to make a difference.

“Our tradtional charity boxes would generate less than £2000 a year so it has been tremendous to see the donations come in so quickly and easily with the electronic charity box.”

The Pennies electronic charity box scheme is currently being employed by a number of high profile chains, such as Go Outdoors, Domino’s Pizza and Zizzi restaurants, as well as The Entertainer.

CEO of The Pennies Foundation Alison Hutchinson said: “We have always known that pennies are powerful, but we’ve been overwhelmed by the generosity of The Entertainer’s customers. We are so pleased that they have embraced the micro-donations and are making a real difference to sick children’s lives.”

Grocery chain Waitrose has announced its intentions to install self-checkout services in all of its stores across the country.

The brand has announced that the self-checkouts will be introduced in every Waitrose store within the next two years, after a successful trial run of 175 self-checkout machines  in 37 of its branches.

The self-checkouts have proven to be particularly successful in the Canary Wharf branch, whereby the self-checkout machines account for 20 per cent of transactions and 13 per cent of total branch sales.

Graham Heald, director of retail services at Waitrose, told the Wincor Nixdorf Executive Briefing in New York: “Particularly at lunch time [in Canary Wharf], we get a huge influx that we could not accommodate with traditional checkout lanes. Self-checkouts work incredibly well. ”

Heald added that by combining self-checkouts with the store’s already established Quick Check /Quick Pay technology, whereby customers can scan their own products as they shop to monitor their spend, Waitrose could remove up to £7million in costs, as well as providing a rapid return-on-investment for installing both Quick Check/Quick Pay and self-checkouts in all of its stores.

He said: “The model only works for us when you bring the two together, so by the end of 2013 a branch without self-checkout and Quick Check will be quite rare.”

Over 24,000 former employees of the now folded Woolworths chain are set to share a compensation payout of around £67.8million.

An Employment Tribunal in London released the judgement on Friday, which ruled that the Woolworths administrators had failed in their legal obligation to consult the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers (Usdaw) before making mass redundancies as the firm collapsed at the end of 2008.

As a result, the tribunal ruled that former employees should be awarded compensation of 60 days’ pay, capped at £330 a week; the highest possible amount that can be awarded in such cases.

However, the ruling does not apply to employees from some of Woolworth’s smaller stores, where fewer than 20 redundancies were made. This means that over 3000 employees from around 180 Woolworths stores may never receive compensation.

Usdaw general secretary John Hannett said: “My delight at the award for the vast majority of our members is tempered by the clear injustice that workers in smaller stores could miss out. Usdaw thinks that UK’s current interpretation of the law on collective redundancies is both unfair and possibly a breach of the European Directive which seeks to protect workers in large scale redundancy situations.

“We are taking further expert legal advice and it is highly likely we will appeal against this part of the judgement.”

Recent figures have shown that around one in five online retail searches in the month of December were made using mobile devices.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) and Google have released their Online Retail Monitor Q4 2011, which shows that retail search volumes grew by 24 per cent in the final quarter of the year. Furthermore, the number of retail searches made using mobiles or tablet devices snowballed, with a 164 per cent year-on-year growth.

On Christmas Day, even more retail searches were made on mobile devices, accounting for around 26 per cent of the total online searches for the day.

Food and drink items had the fastest growth rate when it came to online searches, with a 29 per cent year-on-year rise. The biggest year-on-year increases on mobile devices was for homeware items, gaining a 189 per cent growth.

Stephen Robertson, director general of the BRC, said: “The significant growth in searches from countries such as Brazil and Russia shows the opportunities presented by emerging economies. For many retailers, tapping into these booming consumer markets is an increasingly important strategy for growth.”

Peter Fitzgerald, Google retail director, said: “The usage patterns on the different devices are particularly interesting. Over Christmas desktop search volumes peaked on Monday 5th December and saw a marked drop thereafter. Mobile/tablet volumes remained consistent later into the month, peaking at the weekends, with many consumers likely to have been searching on their devices while out and about.”