British households are bargain hunting and cutting back on weekly essentials to fund going out, according to the latest research by Barclaycard.
The company, which processes nearly half of all credit and debit card transactions in the UK, said consumer spending had grown 3.3% so far this year, matching last year’s growth.
It found that leisure, entertainment and travel spending all grew strongly, with spending on going out up by 11.3%, driven by a 14.6% increase in restaurant spending.
Barclaycard said shoppers had also become more savvy since the financial crisis, with the majority of consumers expected to remain “careful to seek out value for money in their spending”, even as economy recovers.
Spending on food and drink grew just 2.1%– less than any other category – and consumers forked out 1.8% more in supermarkets, which the analysis attributed to shoppers “squeezing the best value from essential purchases”.
Average spend per transaction has fallen by 3.7% this year, but the number of purchases increased 7.4%, with Barclaycard saying UK households had adopted a “smaller, but more often” approach.
Val Soranno Keating, Barclaycard’s chief executive, said: “Despite increased confidence, the value-seeking behaviour that we saw take hold in the tough economic times has become entrenched and we’ve seen consumers responsibly balancing the books by cutting back in one area to spend in another. I suspect it’s a behaviour we’ll continue to see until meaningful wage growth.”
