people had shifted their shopping to online<\/a> retail giant Temu, or other general retailers for whom the apparel component could be split out.<\/p>\n\u201cBricks and mortar clothing retail \u2013 and for that matter their online offerings \u2013 could be losing market share, as well as people spending less on clothing. <\/p>\n
\u201cClothing is one of those things where you can make do with what you\u2019ve got for longer if you are watching your pennies, and it\u2019s notable that until the last month, second-hand stores have been doing very well \u2013 and I\u2019m sure a very big chunk of that is clothing.<\/p>\n
\u201cClothing is obviously a necessity but there\u2019s a lot of flexibility in how much you choose to spend on it and when, so I\u2019d say it\u2019s been behaving more like a discretionary item through this cycle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Westpac senior economist Satish Ranchhod agreed a change had happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cRetail spending on apparel has been tracking flat for quite an extended period. Past the pandemic, we haven\u2019t seen much growth over the last couple of years.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said more affordable consumer goods had been affected by the changes in e-commerce.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you think about fast fashion, you know, a lot of that stuff, you can bring it in cheaply from offshore, and our local retailers are competing with these big overseas-based or online-based retailers, including things like Temu and AliExpress.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carolyn Young, chief executive at Retail NZ, said New Zealand could look at what France and South Africa had done, as models of how a tax or levy could be applied to help local retail.<\/p>\n
France is implementing an environmental fee on ultra-fast fashion brands, which will rise to \u20ac10 ($20) per item by 2030.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you think about a business in New Zealand, they pay New Zealand staffing rates. They comply with the health and safety regulations in New Zealand and their products do as well.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey have to comply to the Fair Trading Act and the Consumer Guarantees Act. There\u2019s always costs involved in those areas. And anything you get in from offshore, you have no idea what their labour environment is like or what they\u2019re paying their people. The product doesn\u2019t have to meet any health and safety standards and they\u2019re not compliant with New Zealand regulations around fair trading and consumer guarantees.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said the Government should impose stronger measures to help level the playing field, such as a levy paid by shoppers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you were buying from offshore, what we would want to see is that there would be a levy that would be applied to that, that would be at a level that would be some sort of equaliser between what New Zealand businesses have to do and comply with.<\/p>\n
\u201cWill everybody come back from shopping with them? I don\u2019t know, but we have to try because that\u2019s just going to make it much more difficult because as soon as you shop offshore, the money goes offshore. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt doesn\u2019t stay in New Zealand, doesn\u2019t create jobs in New Zealand, doesn\u2019t, you know, keep businesses open. And at some point, that\u2019s going to really matter.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said if everyone would shop in New Zealand, it would help the economy significantly.<\/p>\n
Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick said she agreed there was a problem but the French experience had shown a levy could be an unwieldy way to address it.<\/p>\n
Gareth Kiernan, chief forecaster at Infometrics, said it was interesting that the electronic card transactions painted a bleaker picture than the retail trade survey or GDP data on household consumption.<\/p>\n
\u201cSpending on durables and semi-durables tends to get put under pressure during a recession, because people tend to make what they have last longer \u2026 I expect the shift towards online retailing \u2013 both onshore and overseas retailers \u2013 might be skewing some of the numbers that we\u2019re seeing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stats NZ data showed the number of enterprises in the retail trade sector dropped from 29,244 in February 2023, to 29,094 in February 2024, 28,791 in February 2025 and 28,554 in February this year.<\/p>\n
Other sectors that experienced declines over that time included agriculture, forestry and fishing, mining, manufacturing, wholesale trade, professional, scientific and technical services.<\/p>\n
– RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a subset, children and babywear shops were still experiencing activity near 2016 levels. Zollner said it was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":379573,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[95,138,813,19345,25337,2082,25449,440,111,139,69,5415,15400,644,1886,812,7496,71856,223,61],"class_list":["post-379572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-and","tag-business","tag-edmunds","tag-field","tag-firms","tag-for","tag-level","tag-local","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-playing","tag-push","tag-retail","tag-support","tag-susan","tag-tax","tag-temu","tag-the","tag-to"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=379572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/379572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/379573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=379572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=379572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=379572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}