Times have been tough for retailers, and with a small lift in local consumer spending last year, business owners are watching the coming year with cautious optimism.
Nationally, Worldline NZ’s figures show that in 2024, consumer spending growth was the slowest it has been in half a decade, but in the Nelson-Tasman region, the figures crept ever-so-slightly upwards.
While some other parts of the country had negative growth, spending here grew by 2.6 per cent to reach $85 million worth of transactions.
Retailers were still battening down the hatches after a rough couple of years, with the feeling being that of a holding zone as business owners tread water until things improve.
Craig Skillicorn, who has owned Motueka’s Reliance Betta Electrical owner for 37 years, says that as an industry, sales were “pretty flat” in 2024, but they had expected this to be the case.
“We’ve been around since ’88… so we’ve seen this before.”
He says that he was remaining optimistic that, with reducing interest rates, sales would pick up in 2025. In the meantime, they were easing back on holding excess stock as a buffer.
Craig reminded people to support their local businesses to help get them through the tough times, like they had done in droves with great impact post-Covid.
“The big guys can handle it better than the small businesses,” he says.
Down the street, clothing and accessories store Kullawa has also had “pretty flat” sales. Store owner Prade Donoso says that the season had been unpredictable and “bloody tough out there”.
“I was quite shocked at the beginning of January… I was like, where is everyone?” she says. She didn’t take on her usual second staff member this summer, saying it was just not justifiable.
And yet despite this, Prade is one of several retailers who say that the lead-up to Christmas yielded one or more of the biggest days they have had in years.
Whitwells Menswear manager Brent Prestidge says that the pre-Christmas build-up was “quite strong”, but that it seemed to trail off faster than usual. Last year was a mixed bag for the store.
“We’ve had months that have been okay; we’ve had other months that we would have liked to have been a lot better.”
However, Whitwells is a long-standing Motueka institution and Brent has seen the ebbs and flows of discretionary spending before. He encourages his fellow retailers to remember there is still a long stretch of summer ahead, with a smaller but still buoyant autumn crowd to follow.
Wearing another hat as the chairperson for business promotion group Our Town Motueka, he says that although across town, 2024 was “not a year that’s going to excite the accountant too much”, he was expecting a change of trajectory in 2025.
“Motueka is a resilient town, and it’s got a good mix of trades,” he says. “We’re not a one-trick pony – we’ve got a lot of strings to our bow.
"There’s a fair bit that we can hang our hat on, so if the tills are down for a bit, head down, bum up, and get through it.”
He encouraged business-owners to keep holding the line.
