00:00 Speaker A
Well, holiday shopping is officially underway, but growth is cooling with a new report from Colliers forecasting about a 3% rise in total spending this season. That would be below the average for the past decade. For more, we’re bringing in now Anjee Solanki, National Director of Retail Services and Practice Groups at Colliers.
00:23 Speaker A
Uh Anjee, it is good to see you. So let’s start there. You see holiday spending rising 3.1% year over year and and you note that would be below the decade average. So, so start there. What explains that?
00:39 Anjee Solanki
You know, I think what we’re really seeing right now is there’s resilience in retail but there’s also volatility. I think we’ve heard, you know, through, you know, over the past several months that there’s impact, especially when you see kind of that K-shaped divide, right? It’s only going to continue to expand. And what I mean by that is that we’re starting to see that there is this divide where the wealthier are still spending, discretionary spend is quite high. We anticipate that going to continue as it relates to premium brands, um luxury brands, etc.
01:21 Anjee Solanki
But then there’s also that divide where people are very focused on their day-to-day needs and where they’re spending those in terms of value.
01:35 Speaker A
Yeah, there was this to your point, Anjee. Um there was this Bloomberg report. I don’t know if you saw this. This Black Friday, they say more shoppers are using the big discount weekend to stock up on and they talk about essentials. They say it’s dog food, it’s dish soap, they uh mentioned household goods rather than sort of splurging, they report on discretionary items. Um, does that sort of dovetail with what you’re seeing in your your reporting, your research?
02:07 Anjee Solanki
100%. I think what we’re really seeing is there’s, you know, in terms of the sentiment and spend, we definitely are going to see that the sentiment from the consumer right now is that right now we need to hunker down, we need to real really re-evaluate where our spend is. So it’s going to be towards those value-driven concepts. So when we look at Cyber days as well as uh Black Friday, we’re actually our forecast in that space is essentially looking at more online sales than in store.
02:37 Anjee Solanki
For a couple of reasons. Number one, you’re seeing higher discounts uh online. Number two, you’re also starting to see the ease and it’s very easy to find promotions online. So retailers are making it a little more convenient, I would say for people to shop online. So we’re going to start seeing probably about, I want to say 6.4% increase um compared to prior year and spend online versus in store around 2.2.
