Healthy retail: hints and tips for a healthy retail environment is one of a series of five ILC guides created to help retailers understand the barriers older people may face when shopping.

This guidance on Healthy retail: hints and tips for a healthy retail environment should take approximately 6 minutes to read. It gives you the basics on why it’s important to keep our high streets healthy and accessible, and how everyone can benefit: customers, workers and retailers.

We’ve created these guides to help retailers understand how they can respond to an ageing population, and why being inclusive makes commercial sense. Welcoming a wider range of customers and workers opens up new opportunities for businesses.

Everyone’s entitled to a healthy, happy and long life – but the ageing process affects us all differently. Retailers have a key role to play in enabling customers and staff to live healthier, more active later lives. Making shopping environments more accessible supports independence, helps us stay fit, and ensures that people who have a health condition, disability or caring responsibility can maintain access to the products and services they want.

This guide suggests ways to minimise the current barriers that older people, those with buggies and small children, and those with limited mobility or impaired vision may face when using the high street. It also makes suggestions for ways to improve the local shopping environment, with helpful real-life examples and signposts for further information.

ILC has created these guides to help transform the way the retail sector sees and serves older people. We believe that encouraging inclusive shopping spaces is better for everyone, no matter our age or ability.