L'impatto del Covid e della Brexit nella Retail Industry in Gran Bretagna

To define and highlight how the recent resource shortage crisis and the consequences generated by Brexit are still affecting the retail industry in the United Kingdom since 2020, it is first necessary to take into consideration the fact that resource shortages are part of all the risks that make up and characterize Supply Chain management systems. Therefore, we will develop a deep reflection on what the Bullwhip effect is since it is deeply related to the concept of resource shortage. In addition to that, we will define what literature considers as the Retail industry and we will focus our attention on the retail sector in the UK, highlighting how retail stores were affected by shortages themselves combined with a second factor, namely Brexit. In fact, the demand of clients has been changed due to the pandemic situation, when connections with suppliers were dramatically impacted by Brexit. Both events happened simultaneously and generated relevant consequences at the same time. Moreover, little to no literature has been produced regarding the combination of both concepts. As a matter of fact, although both Brexit and shortages have been studied singularly, the two concepts have been rarely combined since only recent events made such a reflection necessary for companies to improve their Supply Chain Management systems. Therefore, we will underline how our research fills in the gap left when studying the effects of both the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit and how they influenced the changes in the availability of resources considering the retail industry in the United Kingdom. To do so, we decided to answer the following research question: how did the effects of both Covid-19 and Brexit impact the retail industry in the UK, with a specific focus on retail stores, during the period from 2020 to 2022?