Christmas shoppers in the Nelson Tasman region spent more than the previous year with some stores reporting their “best December ever”, though Nelson retailers say customers were spending their money carefully.
Tim Babbage, owner of Beggs Musicworks Nelson, says he’s been in retail in the CBD for almost 40 years and says people are still spending.
“It’s been great, December was great, January’s been great. For us, January is normally our worst month because tourists aren’t really our jam.
“Business has been good, there are certain sectors that are struggling a bit but that’s the same in every economic cycle, there’s always someone that’s not doing that well, it’s not always their fault.”
He says Covid was “great” for his business as people found themselves home and bored.
He says there are more stores in Nelson than he’s seen during his time in the central city.
“I think too much is being made of some empty shops, there’s always been empty shops.
“When I started, there was nothing retail in Rutherford, Collingwood, Halifax, St Vincent [Streets] or Selwyn Place, now there’s a whole lot of retail within 500m of Trafalgar St instead of 200.”
Figures from Worldline NZ, which has rebranded Paymark, show the growth rate in the core retail sector (excluding hospitality) during December for the Nelson Tasman region was 2.8 per cent higher than 2022 and resulted in $83 million in transactions.
On Boxing Day alone, the region’s transactions totalled $2.1 million which was 7.2 per cent higher than the previous year and was the third highest percentage increase in the country behind Otago and the Wairarapa.
Crackerjacks Toys owner Tahae Lowe says that December 2023 was the best ever for the store.
Looking at trends over the past 18 months they purchased differently for the lead up to Christmas this year.
“We could see that people weren’t necessarily buying that super expensive stuff, so while we still had them and still had the choice, and people were still buying them, it’s just more people were buying the more affordable items.”
Instead of stocking lots of big ticket items, the choice was made to buy more items with a lower dollar value, while still keeping the high-priced items available.
“It worked because our sales were up,” he says.
“We have Lego sets that are $1800, but what we saw was that people were looking for things that were a few hundred dollars instead.”
Aiming for the same sale value as the last few years – with Christmas 2021/22 being “fantastic”, sales surpassed the previous December, making it the best December ever.
Tahae says the store created a website for the post-Covid world which has had unintended benefits for the store.
“One other thing that we’re finding that we didn’t think about the website is so many locals use it as a catalogue. They will come in and ask ‘where about is this?’ They still want to look at it but they have looked through the website already. Sometimes you can’t fully rely on online, so we’ve found that quite good as well.”
He now spends a lot of time constantly changing and modernising the website, and with more than 6000 individual items for sale, it is no easy task.
But it has paid off for the store with those from out of town and overseas using the website to purchase for family and friends in Nelson, taking advantage of the gift-wrapping service at the same time.
Tim agrees that retail is changing and there’s more business online, but fundamentally good retail has not changed.
“You still have to be focused on the customer, you can’t just put stuff in a store and expect it to sell.”
Worldline NZ’s chief sales officer Bruce Proffit says consumers countrywide made more transactions through retailers in its payments network in 2023 than the previous year, which is the usual pattern, but the average transaction value declined in spite of general consumer price inflation.
The lower average transaction value was against a trend of generally rising consumer prices, suggesting consumers were being more selective and possibly buying cheaper alternatives.
He said pre and post-Christmas spending may have suffered from consumers shopping in Novembers’ Black Friday sales. Across the country, Black Friday in-store retail sales were generally lower in 2023 than the previous year and Nelson-Tasman was no exception, with spending 2.9 percent down at $2.3 million.
