Jingling tills set record

THE great Kiwi Christmas shopping spend-up is on target to top $25 billion – the highest ever.

Retail NZ is projecting $10b worth of spending in December, and $26.5b for the three-month Christmas shopping season ‘‘window’’, which would be 5 per cent higher than last year.

‘‘In the past couple of months, online sales have doubled from what we would normally do.’’

Paymark, which measures card transactions reported a high of 182 transactions per second at midday yesterday, which compared with 177 for the same day last year. A normal day is about 70 transactions a second. These are both in-store and online.

The peak day for shopping is usually Christmas Eve, but it depends on the day it falls. Last year’s peak spending day was December 21, when $282.4 million changed hands.

Greg Harford, public affairs manager at Retail NZ, said December’s retail sales had started out slowly as bad weather kept shoppers home.

‘‘Overall I think December’s going OK but it’s not a standout year for retail.’’

And despite the rise of Black Friday in November, the retail sector expects Boxing Day to offer more and bigger discounts.

PriceSpy expects that almost a fifth of its products will be cheaper on December 26.