This text is taken from the Courrier de l’économie of October 31, 2022. To subscribe, click here.
Quebecers are not insensitive to economic fluctuations. Only, when wages are up and job confidence seems to be proof against anything, worries have less of a bearing on spending plans. This is more or less what the experts’ forecasts for consumption by the end of the year bear witness to.
For Halloween, in any case, it seems that fears of a very short-term recession have not prevented Quebec consumers from opening their wallets this year a little more than they did the last two years. The HelloSafe site also estimated just before this Monday’s edition of the annual celebration of the monstrous and the ineffable that Quebec households planned to increase their Halloween budget by 26% in 2022, compared to what they had spent a year earlier. The estimated $264 million worth of costumes and candy allegedly purchased in recent days is almost twice as much as what was consumed in 2020.
It must be said that the budgets for the past two years had been heavily cut by the pandemic context. Which explains why, even if the expenses related to the horror party this year were much higher than those of the last two years, they did not reach the levels of 2019 or 2018, where each Quebec household spent an average of $80 to $90 celebrating Halloween, compared to $70 this year.
Christmas is tomorrow
Get ready to hear Christmas carols on the radio and in stores starting Tuesday, November 1. We can’t help it: merchants are eager to enter the holiday season, a very lucrative season for them. Consumers should be there this year, at least as much as last year and in 2019, before the pandemic.
According to the Retail Council of Canada, Canadian consumers expect to spend an average of $790 on Christmas gifts this year. Quebecers could be a little more reasonable with an average holiday budget set at $588. While the sums spent are almost unchanged compared to last year, the nature of purchases should change with the rise in prices in recent months. This year, food tops the list of expenses, followed by fashion items and toys.
That said, just because you spend so much doesn’t mean you get what you pay for. Inflation that has not been brought under control since the beginning of the year rather guarantees the opposite. This explains why, even if consumers plan to spend as much by the end of the year, not all merchants will see their sales, and especially their profits, reach the same heights as a year ago.
Because the fact is that inflation influences what Quebec consumers plan to buy for the upcoming holiday season. In mid-October, the firm Deloitte already indicated that “big purchases” were going to be much fewer by Christmas than they were during the same period last year, or before the pandemic. According to Deloitte, electronics (-55%), travel (-30%) and apparel (-27%) will be the biggest losers in holiday 2022.