Shops saw a drop in sales over Christmas, but bargain hunters benefited from lower prices<\/p>\n
The volume of goods sold in UK shops in December fell by 1% from the previous month, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).<\/p>\n
The milder than usual weather hit sales of clothing and footwear, which fell by 6.2% from November – the largest monthly fall on record.<\/p>\n
However, over 2015 as a whole, volumes rose by 2.6%.<\/p>\n
The figures\u00a0suggest it was a good Christmas for bargain hunters, but not so good for the retailers.<\/p>\n
Prices fell by 3.2% over the year, as competition forced many shops to discount goods.<\/p>\n
“The fall in retail sales in December was disappointing, and although annual growth in sales at 2.6% is still reasonably healthy, it is still a marked slowdown compared with previous months,” said David Kern, chief economist at the British Chambers of Commerce.<\/p>\n
Economists had expected the ONS measure to fall in December, following a jump in sales in November.<\/p>\n
“Nonetheless it hit the deck harder than expectations,” said David Tinley of Swiss bank UBS.<\/p>\n
The total amount spent in the retail industry was down 1.4% in December compared with the previous month, but up 1% compared with December 2014.<\/p>\n
The value of online sales fell 5.2% compared with November, but were up 8.2% from a year earlier.<\/p>\n
source: www.bbc.co.uk<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shops suffer as Christmas sales fall, says ONS Shops saw a drop in sales over Christmas, but bargain hunters benefited<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-companies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the-finance-zone.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}