Online immunity: the businesses that are roaring back

It’s a stretch: we’re emerging from the lockdown with different priorities

The Australian way of life has been changed by the pandemic experience, and not just in the regular use of hand sanitiser. Businesses have been cruelled by lockdowns and border closures. In Melbourne, once-vibrant shopping strips are pockmarked by businesses lost. Some, such as newsagents, were already struggling due to the shift to online media consumption, and customers who once frequented other shops have now become used to buying online.

Of course, retail is a dynamic industry, continually evolving to meet demand. Long gone, for example, is the great Australian milk bar, replaced by convenience stores attached to petrol stations. Niche hardware stores have been sidelined by a bigger, better model we’ve all embraced. A similar logic seems to apply to pharmacies, with the advent of bigger, cheaper, jazzier, more densely stocked stores.

But just as the shopping strip was losing some of these anchor businesses in the 21st century, new enterprises arrived to inject energy into the street. In the carefree years leading up to the pandemic, shopping strips supported the proliferation of a lifeform demanded by an increasingly cosmopolitan consumer: the cafe, the bar, the restaurant, the bespoke bijou bakery specialising not in buns but in croissants. Ooh-la-la!

But along came Covid and the outwardly orientated hip-strip lost its zip. With customers quelled into quietude by the need to isolate, these strips seemed destined for the dustbin of retail facilities whose services are no longer required. But then, remarkably, towards the end of the great lockdown there came a flicker, a flame, with once darkened shops sparking into life. What new lifeform could possibly emerge from the Flanders Field of our flattened shopping scene?

Answer: businesses dedicated to wellness and grooming. Hair and beauty salons were always part of the shopping strip (kinda hard to deliver that service online) but now they are joined by Pilates studios and shopfronts for (therapeutic) massage, spa treatments and personal training studios. Even the once humble barber is being made over.

And now even more businesses are discovering that they, too, enjoy immunity from online competition. For the full enchilada toss in medical consulting rooms, medical imaging, cosmetic dentistry, podiatry and physiotherapy studios. Oh yes, and yoga too. Plus leisurewear boutiques selling clothing and accoutrements such as yoga mats. It would not surprise me to see a McMansion with a dedicated yoga room emerge from the Covid rubble.

In the pre-Covid world we liked to be out and about, meeting and being met, planning holidays and weekends away. Travel was integral to the Australian way of life. But over the past two years we’ve retreated to the perceived safety of our respective states. It’s been like travelling back to a time when our nation was cut off from the rest of the world, and it may be many months before we get a full restitution of cross-border movement.

As we emerge from the pandemic, we are still focused on lifestyle but we’re warier. We are more concerned with looking good, keeping well, protecting and projecting our health and wellbeing. Maybe it’s a hangover from Covid. Or maybe an ageing, prosperous and me-focused society was always heading in this direction. Either way, the neighbourhood shopping centre is morphing to reflect our post-Covid preoccupations, and they appear far more likely to align with the cachet of a yoga room than a pool room.