UK retailers endure ‘drab December’ as non-food sales fall flat
Retailers suffered a “drab Christmas”, ending the year with disappointing sales in their most important month, according to new data underlining the difficulties facing Britain’s high streets.Overall retail sales grew by just 1.2% in December compared with a year earlier, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) said.That was below the 12-month average of 2.3%.
While food sales were resilient, shoppers did not spend as much on non-food products such as clothes and computers, with sales slipping 0.3% compared with growth of 4.4% in December 2024.The figures cement early indications that non-food retailers had struggled over Christmas – in the face of mild, wet weather and heavy discounting – while food sales held up.Helen Dickinson, the BRC chief executive, said it was a “drab Christmas” as sales growth slowed for the fourth month in a row.
“Non-food sales fell flat in the run-up to Christmas, with gifting items doing worse than expected,” she said.“Many people were clearly holding out for discounts, with the last week showing significant growth on the back of Boxing Day and beginning of the January sales.”Card spending also dropped in December by 1.7% compared with a year earlier, separate data from the bank Barclays found.It marked a further decline from 1.
1% in November, and was the greatest year-on-year drop since February 2021.Rising prices helped support supermarket food sales, and grocery inflation hit 4.3% in December, according to data from Worldpanel by Numerator.It found shoppers spent an average of £476 in supermarkets in December, about £15 higher compared with December 2024.However, persistently high food inflation means 64% of shoppers intend to cut their spending on groceries this year, Barclays found.
More than half plan to reduce their discretionary spending too, with new clothes and restaurant meals on the chopping block.Discount supermarkets Aldi and Lidl reported record Christmas trading.The UK arm of Aldi posted 3% year-on-year sales growth in the four weeks to 24 December; Lidl said its sales rose 10% in the four weeks to Christmas Eve.Tesco and Sainsbury’s, the two biggest supermarkets in the UK by market share, reported sales growth over the Christmas period.But shares in both companies fell sharply last week as investors had expected stronger results.
Across much of the industry, sales of general merchandise – which includes products such as clothing, games and jewellery – was weak.Argos, which is owned by Sainsbury’s, performed particularly badly, and sales were down 2.2% in the six weeks to 3 January.It said it had faced “significant headwinds from online traffic trends, a tough and promotional general merchandise market and weak consumer confidence”.Shares in Associated British Foods, the owner of Primark, have fallen by about 15% so far this year after it issued a profit warning last week amid weak sales at the fashion chain.
Online competition, especially with the rise of cut-price online sellers such as Temu and Shein, has put significant pressure on traditional retailers.The industry is also grappling with higher costs and low consumer confidence.Three retailers – the jewellery brand Claire’s, the cut-price homewares chain the Original Factory Shop and the clothing chain LK Bennett – are poised to call in administrators.
Post your questions for R&B star Jill Scott
In the age of GLP-1s and the deep-plane facelift making dozens of famous women appear perpetually 32 years old, there’s something extra heartening about Pressha, the lead single from three-time Grammy-winner Jill Scott’s sixth album. “I wasn’t the aesthetic / I guess, I guess, I get it / So much pressure to appear just like them / Pretty and cosmetic,” she sings in a coolly unimpressed kiss-off to a former paramour too cowardly to be seen with her in public.It’s typical of the 53-year-old neo-soul superstar’s direct way with singing about femininity – a quality that’s made her an in-demand collaborator with artists including Dr Dre, Pusha T, Will Smith, Common and Kehlani. As well as having several US No 1 albums to her name, Scott is an artist’s artist: her new record features Tierra Whack, JID and Too $hort; she was originally discovered by Questlove back in her spoken-word days before releasing her platinum-certified debut Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol 1 in 2000.As well as music, Scott has maintained a vivid acting career, starring as James Brown’s wife, Deirdre or “Dee Dee”, in the 2014 biopic Get on Up and taking roles in HBO’s adaptation of Alastair McCall Smith’s The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and BET+’s TV adaptation of The First Wives’ Club
Mindy Meng Wang on the ‘disorienting’ experience of her father’s funeral – and the Chinese cyber-opera it inspired
The guzheng virtuoso remembers being shocked by the traditional ceremony in China’s north-west. Now she’s processing it on stageGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailWhen Mindy Meng Wang’s father died in 2015, the Melbourne-based musician found herself navigating grief while also organising his funeral in her home city in north-western China. It was to be an elaborate, three-day ceremony filled with prescribed rites, including burning paper effigies, ritualised crying and prayer chants.Looking back, Wang describes the experience as “completely shocking and disorienting”. “There were so many rules for what I had to do over those three days, and so many things that I could not understand,” she says
Hawaii: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans review – a feather-filled thriller full of gods, gourds and ghosts
British Museum, LondonThis retelling of Captain Cook’s death and the merging of two cultures is a trove of miraculously preserved wonders – but beware of the shark-toothed club!Relations between Britain and the Pacific kingdom of Hawaii didn’t get off to a great start. On 14 February 1779 the global explorer James Cook was clubbed and stabbed to death at Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay in a dispute over a boat: it was a tragedy of cultural misunderstanding that still has anthropologists arguing over its meaning. Cook had previously visited Hawaii and apparently been identified as the god Lono, but didn’t know this. Marshall Sahlins argued that Cook was killed because by coming twice he transgressed the Lono myth, while another anthropologist, Gananath Obeyesekere, attacked him for imposing colonialist assumptions of “native” irrationality on the Hawaiians.It’s a fascinating, contentious debate
Three board members and board chair resign from Adelaide festival as Randa Abdel-Fattah sends legal notice
The Adelaide festival is facing an unprecedented leadership crisis after three board members resigned this weekend.The journalist Daniela Ritorto, the Adelaide businesswoman Donny Walford and the lawyer Nick Linke stepped down at an extraordinary board meeting on Saturday following the board’s controversial decision to dump the Palestinian Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from the 2026 writers’ week program.Separately on Sunday evening, festival board chair Tracey Whiting confirmed that she had decided to resign, “effective immediately”.She did not detail her reasons for resigning, saying only in a statement: “Recent decisions were bound by certain undertakings and my resignation enables the Adelaide Festival, as an organisation, to refresh its leadership and its approach to these circumstances.”“My tenure as Chair has been immensely enjoyable, as has working with the terrific AF team
Adelaide festival did not dump Jewish columnist from 2024 program despite request from Randa Abdel-Fattah and others
The Adelaide festival board did not dump a Jewish columnist from its 2024 lineup at Adelaide writers’ week, despite being lobbied by a group of 10 academics – including Randa Abdel-Fattah – to do so.On Saturday South Australia’s premier, Peter Malinauskas, claimed that the board had dumped the New York Times pro-Israel columnist Thomas Friedman in 2024, and reiterated his support for the festival board’s decision on Thursday to remove Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian Australian academic, from this year’s program.“I note the Adelaide Festival also made its own decision to remove a Jewish writer from the Adelaide Writers’ Week program in 2024 in very similar circumstances,” Malinauskas told the Guardian through a spokesperson on Saturday.“I support that decision, and the consistent application of this principle.”On Saturday News Corp publications picked up on the premier’s statement, reporting the apparent inconsistency between the public outcry against Abdel-Fattah’s removal compared with the alleged removal of Friedman two years earlier, which did not ignite the massive boycott the writers’ week is now seeing, making the 2026 event look increasingly untenable
Eddie Izzard: ‘I once ran 90km in just under 12 hours. That was a tough day’
When you started performing your one-woman Hamlet, how much did you labour over your delivery of the play’s most iconic lines, such as “To be or not to be”?The first thing I found when I was rehearsing Hamlet was that I felt very at home. I thought, “That’s unusual – I should be quaking in my boots!” I just felt very at ease and happy to be there. But the first time I performed “to be or not to be” on stage, there was a sense of – aren’t bells supposed to ring here? Isn’t there supposed to be a klaxon?I come to “to be” in a slightly different way each night so hopefully the audience haven’t seen it done that way before. I was a street performer for years, so I know how to talk to an audience, which is what they were doing in Shakespeare’s time; they were performing to the people, not at them. Actors got into this fourth-wall thing in the 1800s, it wasn’t there in Elizabethan times
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