Retailers and hospitality firms have warned of the devastating financial impact of a new month-long lockdown in England which they say threatens billions of pounds worth of Christmas trade and puts hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk. The next two months should be the most lucrative time of the year for the high street but 500,000 shops, restaurants and pubs will have to close on Thursday and remain shut until 2 December. Shoppers usually spend around £50bn on goods other than food in the weeks leading up to Christmas as they gift clothes, toys and the latest technology to friends and family. But the new measures will force about 363,000 specialist stores to close, leaving major retailers such as Marks & Spencer and John Lewis with mountains of stock to shift through their websites and the click-and-collect services still allowed to operate. The challenge faced by retailers is underlined by the prediction that shopper numbers in England will drop by about 80% during the November lockdown as Britons are told to shop only for essentials. Diane Wehrle, insights director at Springboard which tracks shopper numbers, said the restrictions meant retailers would now miss out on “essential weeks of Christmas trading, including Black Friday”. During the spring lockdown, the closure of non-essential retail stores meant the high street missed out on £1.6bn of sales each week. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) said the importance of the festive shopping period meant losses are certain to be much bigger and would impact the viability of “thousands of shops and hundreds of thousands of jobs”. The fashion retailer Next said even a fortnight-long lockdown would cut its sales by about £57m. Richard Lim, the chief executive of Retail Economics, said the new lockdown was a “devastating blow” for the industry. “Small retailers remain in survival mode and profits made during the festive period will determine whether they continue to trade into the new year,” he said. Analysts said the closure of the high street would push shoppers into the arms of online specialists such as Amazon. The British Independent Retailers Association said a quarter of independent retailers did not survive the last lockdown and the sector risked being “decimated” by a second. Waterstones managing director James Daunt said the pandemic had been “very, very, very, very, underline ‘very’ as many times are you like, good for Amazon” but bad for small high street businesses. The bookseller could still despatch web and click-and-collect orders from its stores but independent stores would not have that infrastructure to fall back on. “For a big retailer like Waterstones there is a narrow and difficult path through this but I worry for people without that additional capability,” said Daunt. Even before the lockdown was announced Amazon had warned the tilt towards online shopping meant even it was going to be “stretched” to meet the huge volume of orders expected. Similarly Gary Grant, the founder of The Entertainer, has warned that couriers were “already overloaded” and the toy industry would face a struggle to get toys into children’s hands in time. Lim said the shift towards online shopping this Christmas would now be of “epic proportions” and there were serious doubts over whether the industry could cope. “There will be a strain on websites, warehouses and, crucially, delivery networks,” he said. “The industry just isn’t set up for such a colossal switch to online.” The weeks of frenetic socialising in the run-up to Christmas and new year are also extremely important for Britain’s struggling pubs, restaurants and hotels. Some venues bank as much as 40% of their annual profits between Halloween and January. But this year nearly 53,000 pubs, restaurants and cafes in England will have to shut, according to data from the retail estate adviser Altus Group. Hospitality firms were already buckling under the strain of existing restrictions such as the 10pm curfew. UKHospitality, the industry trade body, said the costs of a second lockdown would be “even heavier than the first” as some businesses, such as nightclubs, had never even re-opened. Kate Nicholls, its chief executive, said the hospitality industry had been “pushed to the limits” by the pandemic, with many venues already closing. “For those that have survived, viability is on a knife edge.”