The quality of journalism in this country (with few exceptions that prove the rule), continues to plummet. When it comes to shopping centre issues, it would seem there is a race to the bottom. Recently there were claims that shopping centre foot traffic was significantly down.  The opposite was true; but that doesn’t make for interesting news…

Early last year, a false claim was reported in the media claiming that shopping centre foot traffic was significantly down in the 2018 pre-Christmas trading period.

From our analysis of both the claim and the media report, it came down to a false attribution of proprietary in-store foot traffic data as being shopping centre data, which clearly wasn’t fact-checked.

In addition, there with an associated false claim that the proprietary tool in question was ‘widely used by shopping centre landlords’.

To use a phrase of recent times, it certainly looked and felt like fake news.

Sadly, such is the quality of debate in certain forums about retail and shopping centres, the falsehood was never officially corrected. As time went on, the fake news turned into something of a truism in certain forums.

And, as expected, this led to the boring claims about tense landlord and tenant relationships and whatever else some groups like to think of when trying to talk down our industry.

This was also despite the fact in some other media reports on the same data, the data was correctly attributed to be what it actually was: in-store data.

To clarify, the claim that the in-store data – regardless of what the results said – was shopping centre data was complete nonsense. The false and misleading nature of such a claim was exacerbated given we understand that the data includes a limited sample of stores; is confined to certain retail categories and includes stores outside of shopping centres.

In other words, it is not shopping centre data.

We also tested the claim in the said report that the tool was ‘widely used by shopping centre landlords’.

We surveyed several of our members on the issue, and not one of them used the tool as part of their operations.

Given that the members we surveyed covered (at the time) more than 60% of the national market, it reinforced that any claim that the tool is ‘widely used’ is completely false. Further, it couldn’t even be said that a ‘majority’ used the proprietary tool.

Given this set of issues, the SCCA resolved to undertake our own foot traffic analysis over the November/December 2019 period and compare it with the same 2018 period. We also committed to providing this analysis to relevant key stakeholders in our industry for their information and awareness.

Our first task was to develop a representative national sample to collect and analyse foot traffic data, which we ultimately resolved to have a national market coverage of 20%, which in our knowledge is a larger sample than any we could think of for other market or consumer samples or indices.

Our sample also included centres in metropolitan, regional and rural areas to ensure geographic representation. We also included large (regional), medium (sub-regional), small (neighbourhood) and CBD centres to cover different centre types. This also ensured a representative coverage across discretionary and non-discretionary retailers.

In addition, we ensured that the sample included centres across all median household income levels (as measured by the ABS), to ensure that there was a fair representation of different demographics and communities.

Importantly, we also used stabilised centres to enable a like-for-like year-on-year comparison.

Noting the above, we also sought to ensure that the sample wasn’t directly comparable to any member’s portfolio or could become a quasi-market or industry benchmark.

Overall, the sample included more than 90 shopping centres, which includes more than 10,000 retail tenancies. The results, which we released in January and is on our website, provide an interesting snapshot to say the least.

In particular, this is because the results bring into question some of the negative, generic and misleading claims that continue to be made about shopping centre foot traffic.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Overall, foot traffic increased by 4.0% in November 2019 compared with November 2018.
• Overall, foot traffic increased by 1.3% in December 2019 compared with December 2018.
• Foot traffic increased on Black Friday 2019 by 16.6%, and by 8.4% in the week of Black Friday.
• Foot traffic increased on Boxing Day 2019 by 7.8% compared with Boxing Day 2018.

In addition, Boxing Day 2019 was bigger than Black Friday in nominal terms, with about 2.5 million people visiting the sampled centres.

The top 5 days were as follows:

1. Monday 23 December
2. Tuesday 24 December, Christmas Eve
3. Thursday 19 December
4. Friday 20 December
5. Thursday 26 December, Boxing Day.

Black Friday was the 7th largest day across the 2019 period.

In other words, across the November/December trading period, more people clearly ‘shop closer to Christmas’ with the top four days being in the lead-up to Christmas Day (noting that Christmas Day is a non-trading day).

The reason we have highlighted the result for Boxing Day, along with the top five days, was based on at least one media report which suggested that Black Friday ‘killed’ Christmas retail trading.

From our perspective, Black Friday is part of Christmas trading, and could be seen as ‘kicking off’ Christmas trading. So, despite any notion that it could be ‘killing’ Christmas trading, it instead represents a shift in consumer and spending behaviour in what’s now being referred to as the pull-forward of spending into late November.

In any case, Black Friday certainly didn’t ‘kill’ retail trading. December foot traffic was still solid.

We have provided the key results of our foot traffic analysis to several key stakeholders to simply inform them and raise awareness of our analysis, and to also highlight our willingness to discuss any issues further.

This group ranges from retail analysts, retailer groups (eg. the ARA, NRA and Pharmacy Guild), small business commissioners, retail journalists and some others.

To date, we’ve had a positive response to our analysis and our discussions continue.

We will be giving consideration as to whether we continue this analysis in the longer term, including where such analysis may help improve awareness and clarity on otherwise generic or unsubstantiated commentary on the issue.

Big Guns