Spending moves to online
It's been suggested that the Christmas period was potentially a horror show for retailers - and we always enjoy a bit of a headline - but we'll have to wait for the official statistics to get confirmation of that.
Certainly there's been very little in the way of pricing power for retailers.
It also seems to me that there's a possibility of retailing trends changing faster than surveys can comfortably react (we've already seen recently how the internet has changed the relevance of some job vacancies surveys).
Indeed, the ABS report for November 2018 showed one remarkable statistic, that online retail accounted for a record 6.6 per cent of total turnover, up from only 5.9 per cent in October, (and 5.5 per cent a year earlier) which, if sustained, is a remarkable rate of change.
Black Friday boost
A 30-second look at the November 2018 figures, then: seasonally adjusted retail turnover increased by a better-than-expected 0.4 per cent in the month to $27.12 billion.
As you can see in the chart above the prior year figures were spiked bigly by Black Friday and especially iPhone X sales - rather depressing the year-on-year change in retail turnover - but the smoothed trend series shows a moderate year-on-year growth of 3.6 per cent.
Black Friday and other promotional activities were especially flattering in November 2018 to household goods retailing (+1.2 per cent), and clothing, footwear, and personal accessories (+1.5 per cent), while department stores (+0.4 per cent) saw a modest boost.
The main monthly increases were seen in New South Wales (+0.8 per cent) and the ACT (+1.6 per cent), with Canberra now experiencing the fastest year-on-year growth.
Overall, not bad numbers, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief and save the Apocalypse Now references (for another month at any rate).
The horror. The horror...
