Nearly half (49%) of respondents intended to absorb what costs they can, while 18% are considering consolidating by reducing staff hours.<\/p>\n
It comes as petrol and diesel prices rose on average more than 37% and 150% respectively over March.<\/p>\n
Retail NZ chief executive Carolyn Young said uncertainty is now the trending mood for retailers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s clear the rising cost of fuel, and in particular diesel, is squeezing already tight margins, with lower consumer confidence and discretionary spending impacting sales and profitability,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cRetailers have traditionally shown higher levels of optimism than their sales figures would suggest, so the fact 66% don\u2019t expect to meet sales targets in the June quarter tells us the sector is bracing for a significant and sustained downturn.\u201d <\/p>\n
According to the Retail Radar survey, respondents were most worried by inflation and the cost of living (85%) and freight costs (79%) in the coming months.<\/p>\n
Almost half (48%) of retailers said they had already seen an increase in freight costs of between 11-50% in the first quarter of the year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese concerns are well-founded as the inflationary impacts of the Iran war are likely to be felt in the months ahead, not only through direct freight costs, but also other overheads, such as waste removal or the rising price of plastic packaging,\u201d Young said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly half (49%) of respondents intended to absorb what costs they can, while 18% are considering consolidating by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":410066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[534,84865,138,6150,3105,9961,3806,2082,43007,48879,194,10110,111,139,69,53505,6492,12975,1305,5257,89271],"class_list":["post-410065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-amid","tag-bracing","tag-business","tag-conflict","tag-data","tag-downturn","tag-east","tag-for","tag-fuels","tag-greater","tag-kiwi","tag-middle","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pessimism","tag-retailers","tag-sector","tag-show","tag-significant","tag-sustained"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410065","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=410065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/410066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}