Think your local mall was busy on Saturday – i.e., the last Saturday before Christmas?
It was. According to Moneris, the largest processor of credit- and debit-card payments in the country, Saturday was the busiest shopping day of the year, with total transaction volumes up 10 per cent compared to the Saturday before Christmas 2013.
The annual record won’t last long though, according to Moneris, which said Monday it expects to see single-day transaction volumes hit their 2014 high tomorrow, Dec. 23, as shoppers scramble to get last-minute gifts as well as stock up on food and drink.
“We expect sales to peak tomorrow,” Rob Cameron, head of marketing and product development at Moneris, said.
Tuesday is the last full day of shopping before Christmas, with many merchants closing early Wednesday.
Better than expected
Holiday shopping in general looks to be outperforming some earlier expectations.
Polls and surveys from November and early December suggested consumers — many of whom are confronting sky-high debt loads — were poised to dial back spending this year.
Instead, Moneris said the total dollar volume of transactions across its payment systems at merchants and online was up 5.6 per cent in the first couple weeks of December (compared to the same two-week stretch last year).
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That’s fully two percentage points higher than the 3.6 per cent gain economists at TD Bank were expecting for retail sales growth at the outset of the holidays. “High debt burdens and weaker consumer confidence are likely to weigh on the outlook,” TD said in Nov. 25 research report.
MORE: Canadians pile on debt while U.S. households pay it down
No ice storm – yet
But, “there’s a few positive things going on” that are lifting sales momentum, according to Ed Strapagiel, a retail analyst in Toronto.
Experts suggest the nearly 50 per cent plunge in oil prices and the corresponding decline in gas prices has given Canadian consumers hundreds of millions of extra dollars to spend in the run up to Dec. 25. Analysts at Desjardins said in a recent research note as much as $165.2 million was being saved at the pump each week.
MORE: Here’s how much we’re saving at the pump — and how we’ll spend it
There’s a third, more structural reason why shopping is up this year: more people are working.
At 6.6 per cent, the unemployment rate is also down sharply from a year ago, Strapagiel noted. The jobless rate was 7.2 per cent in December 2013, the highest reading of the last 12 months.
MORE: Job market sputters in November, jobless rate ticks up to 6.6%
The late surge in shopping is also being aided by a final factor, Strapagiel suggested: a notable dearth of paralyzing ice storms — like the kind that left residents in Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada frozen in their homes in the days before Christmas last year.
“We haven’t had our December Ice Storm yet,” Strapagiel said.
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