Mother’s Day spending helps cafes, restaurants

Mother’s Day helped to boost consumer spending last month, but belts are continuing to tighten as we head into winter, according to Worldline.

Consumer spending during May through retail merchants, excluding hospitality, in Worldline NZ’s payments network came to $2.979 billion. This was up 3.7% on May last year and up 16.6% on the same month in 2019.

Spending on Mother’s Day at restaurants and cafes reached $22.4m. This was up 42% on the previous Sunday and up 7% on Mother’s Day last year.

There were higher sales at florists from Thursday to Sunday on Mother’s Day weekend than in the same four days a week earlier (up 169%), although flowers were not as popular as last year, with spending down 19%.

After accounting for extra spending in bookstores the day before, on jewellery, and in other gift stores, the extra spending on mothers was almost $9m, which was up 5% on last year.

Worldline NZ chief sales officer Bruce Proffit said the ongoing influence of inflation made it an especially tough month for retailers that were selling nonfood goods.

‘‘Spending through food and liquor stores in May was up 8.3% on the same month last year,’’ Proffit said. This was ‘‘well below the latest annual rate of food price inflation’’.

According to Stats NZ, food price inflation was at its highest rate since 1987 – with an increase in prices of 12.5% from April 2022 to April 2023.

Meanwhile, spending through the remaining non-food core retail stores was down 3.2%.

‘‘This was especially evident in the major centres, with the combined total spend through food and non-food retailers [excluding hospitality] up a mere 1% on last year in Wellington, 3% in Auckland/Northland and 3.3% in Canterbury – all below the national average.’’

He said there were still positive signs evident in the monthly figures of several regions.

Consumer spending through core retail merchants was running higher than last year in the storm-hit regions of Gisborne (up 6.3%) and Hawke’s Bay (up 6.4%).