Boxing day sales extend record December spending spree
Monday, 27 December 2021
Shoppers across the country spent nearly $100 million on Boxing Day, adding to the record $5.2 billion spent at retail stores in the six-week lead up to Christmas.
Data from Worldline (formerly Paymark) showed the pre-Christmas spend was 6.9 per cent higher than last year, and broke a new record for the Worldline NZ payment network.
Transactions on Boxing Day itself was down 1 per cent on last year, and reached $98 million.
George Putnam, head of data at Worldline, said to get this level of sales through on a Boxing Day only weeks after Auckland emerged from a lockdown was a great effort.
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“To see almost $100m of transactions processed through this group of core retail merchants yesterday shows the record pre-Christmas spending trend that we saw this year is not over yet,” Putnam said.
Auckland saw the biggest Boxing Day transactions with $40 million spent on a single day.
The second-biggest number of transactions came from Canterbury which saw $11.4 million of sales during Boxing Day.
Brad Olsen, principle economist at Infometrics, said the numbers revealed consumer confidence may be higher than originally predicted going into 2022.
“These numbers probably provide some comfort to retailers that Kiwis are willing to get out there and support local. We have had some consumer confidence numbers in recent times that have suggested that spending could soften, but these figures show that this hasn’t happened yet,” he said.
Olsen said the Boxing Day sales numbers being down on last year also did not come as a surprise.
“We have been seeing over the past few weeks that people may have front-loaded a lot of their spending activity going out of lockdown into the traffic light system. While Boxing Day was still important, it was not as impressive as it has been in previous years,” Olsen said.
It had become more common for consumers to spread their spending out on other major sale days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, he said.
But overall, the December spending figures stand retailers in good stead heading into 2022, Olsen said.
“New Zealand is ending 2021 in a robust position. I don’t think we can call this activity as energetic or as confident as we might have liked, or that we can see in previous years. But New Zealanders are getting out and spending after the restrictions of the Delta lockdown.
“These numbers certainly don’t reflect a pessimistic outlook for 2022. The underlying read is probably an upbeat, but also cautious view from consumers,” Olsen said.
Aimie Hines, spokeswoman for Retail NZ, said after a hard lockdown in Auckland it was great for retailers to start to make in-person sales again.
“Retail is a seasonal market and the lockdown has had a significant impact. In September alone there was $2 billion in sales lost in the retail sector, so we really need to regain those numbers,” Hines said.
The 7 per cent rise in pre-Christmas spending was a good sign that consumers were eager to get back to shopping as normal, Hines said.
“It’s a promising sign we just need to sustain that going through to the end of summer. Overall being down 1 per cent in sales on Boxing Day isn’t bad, we would just like to see that sustain and hopefully see some more growth as we go into the new year,” Hines said.
Liisa Matinvesi-Bassett, New Zealand country manager for PriceSpy, said in recent years Boxing Day had become less enticing to many New Zealand consumers.
A survey conducted by PriceSpy revealed 36 per cent of people shopped on Boxing Day last year, down from 42 per cent the previous year.
“With popularity for Black Friday and Black Week on the rise, people are increasingly looking to buy items at discounted prices pre-Christmas, rather than waiting until after Christmas Day,” Matinvesi-Bassett said.