Paul Martin's Business Update - December 27th

Paul Martin's Business Update - December 27th

As the year comes to an end the traditional Christmas blitz for local retailers is also winding down but it will be a month or two before we find precisely how this year stacked up. The growing importance of on-line shopping will have an impact on the way these figures are tallied. While we wait for the year-end assessment, however, we have just received the updated retail numbers for October.

And, in broad terms, they are steady.

At $1.5 billion for the month they were unchanged from September and rose roughly three per cent from October of last year. That is roughly equal with inflation. Those are not the kind of numbers that generally turn heads but they are better than they sound. Newfoundland – with monthly numbers roughly half of ours - joined the Western provinces as being neutral to positive. The rest of the country actually saw a decline. And a key contributor to declining sales volumes were falling gasoline prices suggesting that the number of receipts being issued by local stores is not falling, but they’re smaller in some categories.

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