So why doesn’t it feel better?

On London’s Oxford Street yesterday a man was stood on a box with a loud hailer and a wearing a board proclaiming in big bold letters: “panic no more”. Through the loud hailer he was proclaiming to all the shoppers walking along the Street that “the recession was over” and that “it was safe to go shopping again”. It wasn’t clear - because everyone seemed to be ignoring him - whether he was being employed by the Oxford Street traders to get people back into the shops or whether he was a street artist working unilaterally. Either way, it seemed to sum up nicely how things look and feel at the moment. The UK’s Central Office of Statistics finally proclaimed the end to one of the UK’s most severe recessions, but the growth looked so amaemic at just 0.1% in the last 3 months of 2009 that it felt more like a statistical blip than a burst into a sunnier, more optimistic world.

Retailers certainly aren’t fooling themselves to believe that happy days are here again - not just yet anyway.The economists believe that here in the UK, the numbers will gradually improve as the year unfolds. It all just goes to reinforce how increasingly hard it is for peoples’ attitudes and mood to be influenced by a mere headline. Consumers are still working out how best to handle their household income and expenditure and will make their own decisions on what and when to spend money. But there seems to be another lesson and it is that the pace of change going on around us in every market and at every level appears to be getting faster and faster. In today’s world you have to constantly review back over the months to remind yourself what has happened and what is happening. I was struck by exactly that in the last few days after reading an editorial in a magazine which was describing its launch back in only 2003. As it said,this was just as the ipod was being launched but before MySpace, Facebook, Spotify or even YouTube has been launched. All of these have made such an enormous impact on the way people live and work today but all created within a decade.

Change is going on all around us even if we don’t even really notice. With Apple launching their much awaited “tablet” computer today, this might be one of those days to mark in the diaries marking another of those changes.