Norman Grindley/Deputy Chief Photographer
Bustling crowds and vendors in downtown Kingston, December 24.

Susan Gordon, Business Reporter

For the Yuletide season just ended, Jamaicans withdrew $6.175 billion from the Multilink network during December 2007, the apex of the shopping season.

But operators of the service say activity at automated teller machines and point-of-sales terminals, which are used as proxies to estimate retail activity, was below expectations.

"Spending this Christmas was less than the $6.597 billion projected as the value withdrawn for December," said Edmundo Jenez, the general manager for JETS whose company oversees the Multilink network.

Still, while transactions did not hit the target, their value was 18.5 per cent higher than December 2006.

The most active day for Multilink transactions was Friday, December 21, "and not Christmas Eve as some would have thought," said Jenez.

On the most active day, withdrawals hit a new record of $429.36 million, peaking above the most active day in December 2006 by about $62.4 million, according to data provided by Jenez.

Additionally, while Christmas Eve is usually one of the biggest days for shopping, this has not been the case in the past two years.

Also in December, the number of transactions exceeded the projected activity by 10,169, but the value of the withdrawals was six per cent below the estimates for December.

"We were dead on with the transactions," said Jenez. There was a variance of 0.27 per cent in terms of how they would use their cards, but spending patterns were some 6.0 per cent below the target, so we are still trying to figure out how that happened," he said.

Activity ahead of Christmas

He theorises that the lower-than-expected spend could have been the result of activity ahead of the Christmas season, saying it was likely that unplanned expenses linked to the rains at the end of the summer, the hurricane in August, and the repair bills which came with them, had left consumers with less money for the traditional Yuletide splurge.

He also believes the reduction in spending could be linked to inflation, which would have meant more expensive and less affordable goods.

On Christmas Eve, which fell on a Monday, transactions on the Multilink network totalled $344.46 million.

On December 21, the $429 million recorded indicated spending pulls of $271 million from ATMs, and $157.98 million at point-of-sales machines.

Jenez said the activity conformed with the trends, as it was usual for the peak day of spending to occur at the beginning of the weekend prior to Christmas Day.

susan.gordon@gleanerjm.com