For twenty years, retail could afford to be inefficient. Growth hid the waste. There were always enough new customers entering the market that losing some never mattered.
Open another store. Launch another range. Buy more advertising. Sign a bigger influencer. If one customer drifted away, another was usually waiting behind them, and the arithmetic of expansion covered the ones who left.
That equation no longer works. Retail faces two problems at the same time. The customers it already serves are spending more cautiously, while attracting new ones has become steadily harder. Inflation explains part of that change. The rest is structural. The average cost of acquiring a customer is around 60% higher than it was five years ago. Ad auction inflation and the loss of tracking precision have pushed acquisition costs steadily upwards, regardless of what any individual retailer does, and they continue to rise. For most of that twenty years, the influencer economy was the most efficient expression of the old model: pay the right personality and customers followed. Today the assumptions that underpinned it are being challenged. Movements like Anti-Haul, Project Pan and deinfluencing have normalised a behaviour retailers spent years trying to discourage: satisfaction with what people already own. Consumers are increasingly encouraged to finish products rather than replace them, and repair rather than upgrade. The lever that used to deliver the next customer on demand is both more expensive and less reliable, and neither of those shifts reverses when interest rates fall.
So retention stops being a recession tactic and becomes the permanent condition. When the cost of winning a new customer keeps climbing and the levers that used to lower it are structurally weaker, every customer you lose without needing to stops being a rounding error and becomes the thing that decides the year.
That is where accessibility enters the conversation, though not in the way it usually does.
Retailers optimise the customers they can see
Retail has spent the last decade improving almost every part of the customer journey. Websites are faster, logistics are smarter, loyalty schemes are increasingly personalised, and pricing is optimised down to the individual product. Entire departments exist to lift conversion by fractions of a percent.
Yet many retailers still lose customers for reasons that have nothing to do with price or product. A wheelchair user arrives to find an entrance they cannot use. A blind customer cannot navigate the website. Someone with autism abandons a purchase because the environment is overwhelming. A customer with arthritis cannot open the packaging once it is home.
None of these people rejected the product. The retailer rejected the customer, usually without ever knowing it had.
For years that did not matter, because enough other customers kept arriving to cover the loss. In a slower market, it matters a great deal, because these are not customers you failed to persuade. They are customers you already had and lost without noticing.
Accessibility is leakage prevention
This is the shift in language the sector has missed. Marketers spend their careers on acquisition. Finance talks about margin. Operations talks about efficiency. Almost nobody describes accessibility as revenue leakage, and that is exactly what it is.
Consider how much effort goes into conversion. Retailers A/B test checkout buttons, shave seconds off page load times, and personalise offers to individual shoppers, all to move people through the funnel more efficiently. But a customer who cannot enter the building, read the website, or use the fitting room never enters the funnel in the first place. Accessibility sits upstream of conversion. Customers who cannot enter the journey never reach the point where conversion optimisation matters.
That distinction changes which conversation accessibility belongs to. Framed as compliance, it competes for budget against every other good intention and usually loses. Framed as leakage, it is quantifiable lost revenue, and it sits on a different line of the P&L, one that a business under pressure cannot as easily defer. Retailers can usually tell you the value of stock lost to theft or damage. Far fewer can tell you the value of customers lost because they simply couldn’t use the experience.
The irony is that disabled customers were simply earlier. They have always valued products that work, environments that are intuitive and services that remove friction, because they had to. Increasingly, those are the same qualities the wider market expects. Accessibility is no longer about serving a different kind of customer. It is becoming a proxy for good retail.
The market this leakage points to
The Purple Pound is often presented as a niche. It is not. Disabled people and their households account for an estimated £446 billion in annual spending power in the UK (University of Bristol and Money Advice Trust, November 2025). That spending has existed for years. What has changed is the commercial cost of failing to capture it.
There is a further reason this market rewards the retailers who win it. When people find a business that genuinely works for them, they tend to stay, because switching is not simply trying another shop. It means learning another website, another layout, another parking arrangement, another set of unknown barriers. Accessible experiences are still rare enough to be worth returning to, which means accessibility creates the thing every retailer is now chasing: customers who do not leave.
And the improvements that earn that loyalty rarely serve only one audience. A clearer layout, better signage, a more intuitive website, packaging that opens, a changing room that works, staff who know how to help. Each begins with disabled customers and reaches well beyond them, to parents with pushchairs, older shoppers, people carrying heavy bags, first-time visitors. Accessibility is unusual among retail investments in that fixing it for one group tends to fix it for many.
The better question
Retailers have spent years asking how to persuade more people to walk through the door. The better question is why so many walked straight back out.
The Purple Pound is not new. The economics around it is what changed. As retailers search for the next source of growth, many will find the opportunity was never about finding another customer. It was about finally noticing the ones they had been teaching to shop somewhere else.