Christmas spending to hit $5 billion by the end of the month

Monday, 24 December 2018

At this rate it's expected December spending will hit $5 billion by the end of the month. Last year spending for the same month was $5.9b.

If you hit the shops over the past couple of days, you're not alone.

Over the last weekend before Christmas, shoppers spent $429 million in New Zealand stores, racking up a new record of 182 transactions per second, according to Paymark.

The biggest spending day was Thursday, December 20, with $296m in sales, down slightly from $299m around the same time last year.

At this rate it's expected December spending will hit $5 billion by the end of the month.

Paymark's spokesman Paul Brislen said data showed Christmas shopping could have started a lot earlier this year with Black Friday in November.

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Food and liquor spending took on a greater prominence over the weekend before Christmas.

'Typically Christmas Eve is the biggest shopping day of the year but because this year it fell on a Monday, that blunts the effect. Instead of a single spending day, the peak is spread out in the lead-up to Christmas Eve, so we saw Thursday and Saturday as our two biggest days,' Brislen said.

'Black Friday is a bit of a dark horse - it's suddenly arrived on the New Zealand retail calendar with a lot of marketing spend in terms of advertising.

'We saw quite a large uptick on Black Friday and the associated weekend, which has changed the way we shop in the lead-up to Christmas, at least for this year.'

Spending over the past weekend was up 3.1 per cent compared to the same pre-Christmas weekend the year before.

Over the weekend, gift buying continued aplenty but food and liquor spending took on a greater prominence.

Spending on food and liquor was up 32 per cent on the prior weekend, with more than $130m spent.

But one fund manager is urging Kiwis to eschew material things.

Juno KiwiSaver's head of investment Paul Gregory said New Zealanders should be mindful of their spending and check in with their favourite charity or assess their KiwiSaver balances before hitting the mall.

He said people should think about the three 'buckets' of spend, save and give.

'Retailers trumpeting big Christmas sales can easily take care of 'spend', but why not also think about often under-funded charity work, and your KiwiSaver balance, rather than concentrating solely on what's in the sales?

'If this year's Boxing Day spend is even slightly higher than the $238m spent during the Black Friday extravaganza, that equates to $100 spent across the two shopping events by every man, woman and child in the country.

'While $100 might not sound a lot at an individual level, if even a portion of it were to be invested into a KiwiSaver account or donated to a charity, instead of spent on goods and services, the potential returns are really strong – from both a social good, and an investment point of view.'