The litany of organisations - many household names - that have gone to the wall this year illustrate the problem well - Oddbins, Habitat, Focus DIY, Jane Norman, Dolphin, Moben, Lombok � retailers that have, for one reason or another, failed to make ends meet.
Others have fared little better. Carpetright, HMV, Thorntons, JJB Sports, Dixons Retail, Blacks, among others, have been forced into various emergency measures, from store closures and redundancies to profit warnings and restructuring.
It is, to put it mildly, a pretty bleak outlook.
The trouble facing the sector is borne out in data from the Office for National Statistics, the latest of which show that there was no growth in the volume of sales between August 2010 and August 2011. While the value of sales increased by 4.7 percent, much of this can be attributed to the increase in VAT with the remainder to rising input costs.
But the retail space is also diverse. For some, such as discount stores and value supermarkets, difficult economic times can provide a boost; for others, such as home furnishings, the exact opposite is true.
Data published by the British Retail Consortium (BRC), and analysed by KPMG, illustrates this point, with a clear divide between food and non-food retail.
On the release of the data in early September, Stephen Robertson, director general of the BRC notes: "It remains a tale of two halves. The food sector has proved more resilient, but non-food retail showed a marked decrease in sales year-on-year."
So, the moral of the story seems to be this � if you must be in retail, be in the right type of retail.
Here, Andy Hall can at least breathe easily. As finance director of booming national bike retailer, Evans Cycles, Hall is in the right place at the right time, having joined the organisation in 2010. But, regardless of how resilient the cycle industry is to the downturn and however much it continues to capture the public's imagination, he remains cautious.
Behavioural changes
"I don't think we're much different from the rest of the retail high street," Hall says. "The consumer's obviously finding [less] money in their pocket, their take-home pay has gone down and they're probably a little bit worried about all the doom and gloom in the world. So, whenever they have the chance to think about whether they should spend money, they tend to reconsider."
Although fashionable, Hall is quick to point out that his products are by no means small-ticket items, with the average cost of a bike reaching around �600. And it's these types of considered, discretionary purchases that consumers are thinking long and hard about.
"The reality is that a lot of people are choosing to go bike riding with a second-hand bike," he says. "So things like our servicing is up significantly, indeed some of our more specialist parts like wheels are selling well because people are deciding to keep hold of their frames.
"Ultimately that has two issues for us: one, we get most of our upside from selling a bike and, two, the add-ons � so, if consumers are not coming in to buy a bike they might not come in to buy add-ons either."
Of course, a stuttering economy is not the only issue having an impact on the British high street � a change in consumer behaviour was well under way prior to the 2008 crash and, arguably, has only been hastened by it.
Recent research by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows how the impact of the digital world is an opportunity and a threat to retail businesses. In 2008 just 4 percent of online consumer shopped online more than once a week � in 2010, this had more than trebled to 14 percent.
This has more than one impact. The obvious one is that traditional retailers with a large portfolio of bricks and mortar retail outlets must assess their balance sheets in order to determine the retail outlets they should keep. It's a trend already in play, with Carpetright, Thorntons, JJB Sports, Comet and Blacks Leisure having closed hundreds of stores between them.
But while the natural reaction is to view the growth of online as a threat to traditional retailers, the opposite can be true. The strength of a brand is still immensely powerful, and consumers are more likely to shop online with a brand they trust than with one they have little knowledge of.
A combined offering
It's a trend that PwC highlighted in its research. Survey respondents were asked whether spending with their favourite online retailer had increased since they had started to shop across multiple channels. Just less than half of online shoppers said it had remained broadly the same, but the remainder said it had increased; 9 percent by more than a quarter and 27 percent by more than 10 percent.
It's a revenue opportunity that few CFOs can afford to miss out on � even those in booming sectors such as cycling. "We recognise that our online business is growing very, very quickly and that's a challenge that we're trying to meet," Halls says.
As a result, Hall gave his blessing to a further �200,000 investment on refreshing the Evans website in 2010, which is just part of a wider �1 million investment in the organisation's IT systems.
Indeed, the success of Evans's online business is influencing Hall's overall capital expenditure programme. With Capex running at between 3.5 percent and 4 percent of revenues, Hall sees this as the right level of investment going forward, despite it peaking in 2010/11 at between 4 percent and 5 percent when between eight and nine stores were opened, rather than the more usual four.
"I think that's probably going to be the level we go forward with; partly driven by the web, because while we're getting strong sales there [at the stores] we don't need total national coverage," he says. "We may only need 75 from our current base of 45 � It has been the online side that's made us think like that."
The retail sector is a complex beast. While the big four or five supermarkets continue to rumble on like some sort of modern day army, occupying high streets the length and breadth of the country, other areas are on their knees. Meanwhile, there are some isolated pockets which continue to boom.
But even those companies that continue to grow must remain vigilant � and in this type of environment, robust, timely data is crucially important.
"Our forecasting is improving because we've got better internal information," says Hall. "Then, you just have to cope with the outside world, in which we know average spends are coming down. You're seeing if you can drive the volume of sales through to make up for that.
"On the tail-end of an investment we made, we put in a much better CRM system and with that, we're cleaning up the data and making sure we can not only use it for transactions ... but also to track when someone comes in and spends, whether it's in the store or online," explains Hall.
"Ultimately, we haven't got the type of loyalty scheme that Tesco has, but that type of thinking is right up our street on the basis that we know a lot of our customers are very loyal to us."
And those retailers with loyal customers can more easily absorb the hit to sales that the ongoing economic crisis is creating.
Things can't be all that bad if you've got the right model however. The grand opening of Westfield's shopping centre (pictured) in London's east end is testament to that as it drew in crowds of over 200,000 and took a record �4 million during its first day of trading on 13 September.