Inflation has hit Christmas shopping this year, one economist says.
Worldline’s latest data showed Friday was a busier shopping day than Saturday.
The peak hour of spending over the past two days was between noon and 1pm on Friday, when there were 650,909 transactions across the Wordline network.
Worldline was formerly known as Paymark.
The peak hour of spending on Christmas Eve was between 11am and 12pm, when there were 607,706 transactions.
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That is compared to a record peak hour in 2019, when there were 679,436 transactions between 12pm and 1pm on Christmas Eve.
Peak transactions per second were also down slightly on previous years, with 192 recorded during the busiest hour on December 23, just below the 193 recorded in the busiest hour of December 24 2021, and markedly below the all-time record of 204 in 2020.
Worldline NZ’s chief sales officer Bruce Proffit said while this year’s number of transactions in the peak hour of pre-Christmas shopping was slightly lower than last year, overall data for the full week would probably show shoppers had spent more this year than last year.
“We saw the final week of Christmas shopping start strongly, with spending on December 18 reach 12.1% higher than the previous Sunday and early indicators were that this strong trend was continuing.”
Consumer spending through core retail merchants in Worldline NZ’s payments network (excluding hospitality) was $881 million in the week ending December 17, which was up just 1.9% on the week ending December 17 in 2021 but up 14.6% on the same week in 2019.
Christel Yardley/Stuff
We bought less but paid more for it, the data suggests.
“We will have a full breakdown of the numbers for the last full week of core retail spending prior to Christmas on Tuesday, the day after Boxing Day, but at this stage it looks like 2022 could be set to take out the record of highest ever consumer spend for pre-Christmas shopping in New Zealand,” Proffit said.
Economist Brad Olsen said the data showed lots of spending but seemed to indication inflation was hitting. “People are having to spend more on presents and needing to be a bit more restrained on the actual volume of presents.”
He said the fact that peak transactions were down 4.2% from the 2019 peak suggested people were buying less but paying more for it.
“It’s also interesting that peak hour transactions this Christmas period were on the 23rd, it’s the first time since 2018 that peak hour wasn’t on Christmas Eve. Although some shops won’t be open on Saturday I suspect that part of the reason for peak hour being on Friday this year was people looking to try and get in ahead a little bit more.
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