As people scramble at the malls and add to their online shopping carts, it\u2019s believed December may not be as strong as November when it comes to retail sales.<\/p>\n
Retail analyst Bruce Winder tells 1130 NewsRadio people started their Christmas shopping early, and Black Friday saw a strong showing.<\/p>\n
\u201cNovember was somewhat positive for retail. I know Statistics Canada released an early glimpse of it \u2014 up about 1.5 per cent \u2014 and that includes inflation as well,\u201d said Winder.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we saw was consumers flock to the big shopping days \u2014 so if you look at Black Friday and the days leading up to Black Friday.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he says December statistics will likely be softer than normal.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw some pretty good traffic and some pretty good sales as consumers waited in the weeds for the deals. Consumers won\u2019t be buying much at regular price this year because everyone is a little tighter this year with their money.\u201d<\/p>\n
But he says another shopping event will help increase spending.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re going to see, probably, a decent Boxing Day and really Boxing Week now, because Boxing Day is no longer a day.\u201d<\/p>\n
Winder says the upside of those sales starting early is saving money, while the downside is limited supplies.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat makes it real rough for consumers. What retailers have done is engineer specials to drive traffic that week. It is a bit of a messy shopping event, based on what inventory is left. There are a lot of odds and sods, and sizing might be off, and that\u2019s why it\u2019s take what you get kind of thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the attraction of shopping online, Winder says the stats show people are still going to malls \u2014 older generations more than Gen Z.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn average, online shopping in Canada is between 10 and 15 per cent of sales, but it over-indexes in the fourth quarter because people are deal-hunting, and it\u2019s more efficient to deal-hunt online. And some of the big retailers have made it super easy now with same-day delivery on items and different delivery windows.\u201d<\/p>\n
Looking ahead to 2026, Winder doesn\u2019t think Canadians can maintain the spending habits of the last couple of months.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s going to be a bit of a spending hangover. A lot of research shows consumers are going to be frugal this year. But realistically, when push comes to shove, a lot of consumers overspend. In addition, you\u2019re seeing more use of \u2018buy now, pay later,\u2019 especially for younger consumers, so they\u2019re going to start to have to get those payments in the new year and usually start to get their bills come in \u2014 and they\u2019re going to be a little shy about spending, at least for the first quarter.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As people scramble at the malls and add to their online shopping carts, it\u2019s believed December may not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":364781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45,49,48,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-364780","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-economy"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}