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A last-minute Christmas rush and strong Boxing Day sales rescued retailers after a slow start to December, electronic transaction figures show.
Late shoppers spent up large at pre-Christmas and Boxing Day sales, ignoring warnings from Reserve Bank Governor Alan Bollard to rein in spending.
Paymark, which collates credit card and eftpos payments, says the value of electronic transactions for the week before Christmas and for the three days after were up 21 per cent on 2005. As a result of late spending, Paymark transactions for December that were looking grim ended up 2 per cent higher than in December 2005.
The figures from Paymark, which controls around 80 per cent of the machines recording eftpos and credit transactions, do not include cash sales and so are more an indicator of trends.
The Retailers Association said early indications of a 2 per cent rise were "respectable", given that 2005 was up around 5 per cent on 2004.
Association northern region manager Russell Sinclair said the retail scene this Christmas had been marked by significant discounting in sales both before and after Christmas.
Retailers had struggled to understand patchy consumer demand early in December.
Greg Muir, executive chairman of children's clothing company Pumpkin Patch, said because all retailers stocked up for Christmas it was important to clear as much stock as possible for January.
December sales were typically up around 8 per cent on the rest of the year and for some retail categories it garnered a more significant portion of revenue.
The growth of last-minute shopping before and after Christmas has replaced shopping early in the month.
But there was also an 11.64 per cent increase in sales on January 1 and January 2 this year.
Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve were on a Sunday this year and sales for those days was down 12.6 per cent and 11.22 per cent respectively.
Sinclair said the fact that there was a full seven day week in the run-up to Christmas may have influenced the trend toward last-week shopping.
But the figures for a 21 per cent rise in sales through Boxing Day was significant, he said.
Although there was still information to collect there was a clear trend towards vouchers bought before Christmas as gifts and redeemed later.
Sinclair said the other trend was for people to pay using credit rather than debit cards.
