After all the heart-warming cartoons, gallivanting supermodels and human drama of the retailers’ TV advertising campaigns, the real business of making the tills ring this Christmas has started in earnest. Unfortunately the economic indicators being reeled out this week don’t make for such pleasant reading.

Figures from the BRC-KPMG Retail Sales Monitor published today show things are in many ways worse going into this Christmas than this time last year.

With total footfall down 2.9% year on year in October, a winter chill has suddenly been cast across all those happy news stories suggesting the economy is back on track.

High-street footfall saw the greatest drop – 3.6% – and this week’s news that Tie Rack has become the latest name to find itself strangled by austerity (as much by cash-strapped consumers as by crushing rates levels) doesn’t add to the cheer.

Meanwhile, empty shop figures remain at the same depressingly high levels – the national town-centre vacancy rate was 11.1% in October, unchanged from July.

The only good news seemed to be for out-of-town locations, which saw footfall drop by 1.2% – a fall, but not as bad a fall as in the BRC’s last report.

So the Grinch has well and truly arrived early this year and retailers must be praying for some real signs of the “recovery” yielding increased spending, not to mention some gentler weather (I’d suggest avoiding the Daily Express’ gloomy front pages for the foreseeable future – today’s cover: ‘Winter snow blasts in and there’s more to come’).

The BRC said it was hoping for a festive boost in the weeks ahead, but its numbers don’t fill one with confidence. Unlike IGD, which this week forecast UK shoppers would fork out a whopping £19bn on food and drink this Christmas – a predicted 3.9% increase on last year.

Yet even the optimistic IGD notes the big winners are likely to be the discounters, while analysts widely expect an online boom to freeze out the high street once more. Shops that don’t have a compelling offer either on price, premium or convenience risk being left out in the cold once again.

All of a sudden the battle to come up with the best ad doesn’t seem so important after all.

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