I hope you all had a fantastic break!
Next week, the UK market will be treated to trading updates from major retailers after the Christmas trading period.
We’ll have updates from: Next (LON:NXT) (I hold), Tesco (LON:TSCO), J Sainsbury (LON:SBRY), Greggs (LON:GRG) and perhaps others that have escaped me.
Christmas week retail footfall: Retail Times have been studying footfall data from MRI software. For Christmas week as a whole, they say:
…when viewed year on year, footfall was +3.9% higher across all UK retail destinations, suggesting that the later placement of Christmas in the week provided shoppers with additional time to complete last-minute festive purchases.
Post-Christmas sales: this was positive, too. Drapers reports that total UK retail footfall rose 1.6% year-on-year, for Saturday 28th December. High Streets and retail parks were both up by over 2%, while shopping centres had a slight decline:
MRI said the positive performance over 27 and 28 December offers an encouraging signal for retailers heading into the final days of the festive period, underlining the growing role of leisure-led footfall and the importance of destination mix in driving post-Christmas trading.
It's an exciting time for retailers and for shareholders in retail stocks - let's keep our fingers crossed that this promising footfall data translates into good news for all concerned.
It might also be worth mentioning that the UK consumer confidence index by GfK rose in December (it's still negative, but less negative than before):
Chart: tradingeconomics.com
Minus 17 is as strong as this consumer confidence index got in 2025.
It did reach minus 13 in 2024, but only temporarily:
While there is little doubt that the UK consumer is challenged, this objective measure tells us that the consumer is not currently more challenged than it was for most of 2024, and it's probably much healthier than it was 2023.
How this will play out for particular companies depends naturally on their positioning: is a challenged consumer more or less likely to shop at Tesco (LON:TSCO), for example? Are there more switchers from M&S to Tesco, or from Tesco to Lidl?
For what it's worth, Lidl GB has reported a 10% rise in Christmas sales. Their customer numbers rose 8%. This suggests quite…
