Looking at the longer-term trend, retail sales volumes in August stood 6.3% above the 2021 monthly average. Although the fixed-base index declined compared with the previous month, revisions to recent data suggest that we can no longer speak of a plateau. Instead, a modest upward trend appears to be taking shape.<\/p>\n
The details behind August\u2019s weaker performance highlight the impact of extreme weather. Non-food retail sales were broadly stagnant, while mail-order and online sales increased by 3% MoM. By contrast, in-store sales fell significantly, by around 1-3%, across almost every segment. One notable exception was clothing, where sales increased by 3% on a monthly basis. It seems the extreme heat may have prompted consumers to refresh their wardrobes with lighter, more breathable clothing.<\/p>\n
Sales at grocery stores fell by 0.4% MoM. Given that the decline was concentrated in stores selling food, beverages and tobacco, we cannot rule out the possibility that households shifted some purchases to online channels to avoid the heat. Fuel sales, meanwhile, dropped by 2.1% compared to the previous month. Given the sharp increase in fuel prices, this suggests a relatively strong demand response to higher prices. The weakness in August retail sales can therefore be partly attributed to lower fuel purchases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Looking at the longer-term trend, retail sales volumes in August stood 6.3% above the 2021 monthly average. Although…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-622738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622738","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=622738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}