Nikki Murran

You're very welcome along.

As you know, over the last few weeks and into the next few weeks, we'll be spending a lot of time where?

Well, in retail premises, shops of all kinds, whether they're pop-up or more stationary or otherwise.

And a lot of them are struggling or certainly facing a lot of headwinds at the moment.

One of those is pay.

Retail pay has increased by 40% since 2020, the year of COVID.

The national minimum wage is set to reach €14.15 per hour this January coming.

And of course, there's a lot of other things in the pay area that retailers are having to be balanced about.

Competitiveness and cost control is top of their agenda.

So what exactly is happening in the sector?

Nicky Moran is the Director of Grocery Retail at XL and he joins me now.

Good morning.

How are you?

Nicky, I just wanted to ask you, first of all, we've known there's been a number of different pay components, minimum wage.

It's when you put it all together, it's quite a large, large increase.

Have the retailers been able to offset some of that with the price increases?

Because we do see obviously inflation problems.

So how are they balancing those two?

Yeah, and it's worth going into the different elements to it.

You've got auto enrolment on the pension side, you've enhanced sick pay, higher insurance premiums, like everybody, I suppose, higher energy costs.