Shoppers still feel 'very worried' about their financial position and debts and are passing up on high-value purchases as a result.
Consumer confidence remains weak, with debt fears and other financial worries widespread in the credit crunch.
This is the main contention of new comments from the British Retail Consortium (BRC), an industry group which provides analysis of the situation on the UK high street. It follows recent figures from the BRC showing that retail sales values dropped by 1.2 percent from March to April - suggesting that British shoppers are still wary about spending big in the recession and potentially pushing themselves further into debt.
The comments also come after the latest survey from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), another business group. The April data show that the number of retailers who felt that sales had risen over the first half of the month, compared to those who said sales had fallen, stood at 44 percent against 41 percent - a difference of +3 percent.
Responding to this report, the BRC suggested that while the figures were "obviously good news", they also reflected "weak" overall levels of consumer confidence as the CBI had already tracked a -44 percent balance of prices for March. The figures also represent sales volumes, rather than values.
Richard Dodd, spokesman for the BRC, added: "There's no question that customers feel very worried about spending on pretty much anything other than essentials. That's because people are still very worried, particularly about jobs because of the wider economy and its impact on them. Even if they are not currently feeling the pressure personally then of course they [expect] they are going to."
He added: "People are very worried about their own job prospects, about how they are going to meet their bills in the future."
