Shoppers spent more in August. Just not on their homes.

South Africans spent more in shops in August than a year earlier. They bought more clothes and more furniture. The one thing they bought less of was what goes into fixing and painting a house.

If you paint, tile, renovate, install or repair for a living, that matters more to you than the headline number.

What Stats SA reported

On Wednesday, 21 October, Stats SA's retail trade release showed retail sales up 3.3% in August, measured after inflation. Clothing and footwear rose 6.5%. Hardware, paint and glass fell 3.6%, the only type of retailer to shrink, with sales of about R7.8 billion for the month.

It is not a one-month blip. Hardware sales were lower than a year earlier in May, June, July and August, after barely moving in March and April. Over June to August they were down 2.9%, while retail as a whole grew 2.6%.

Cashbuild saw a similar pattern earlier in the year. In its fourth-quarter update on 23 July, the building materials retailer said till transactions at its existing stores fell 1% in the three months to June, even though revenue at those stores still rose 1%. People made fewer trips and spent a little more on each one.

Customers are still spending. They are choosing what to skip, and the house is losing.

What it probably means for your enquiries

These figures cannot tell you exactly who stopped buying. Hardware stores sell to contractors as well as homeowners, so part of the dip may be fewer jobs on the go rather than fewer weekend projects. Either way, our read is that bigger home projects are being put off or cut down, while urgent repairs still get done. That changes what a good quote looks like.

Worth doing now:

• Split big jobs into stages. A customer who balks at the whole renovation may say yes to the bathroom first. Price stage one properly and show plainly what would follow.
• Lead with what cannot wait. If you find a leak, rot or a safety problem, put it at the top of the quote, priced apart from the nice-to-haves.
• Keep "not now" quotes on record. A customer who postpones in October is often ready again after the holidays. Note why they paused and when they suggested you check back.
• Check your materials line. Cashbuild put its own selling inflation at 1.5% in June. If your materials prices have climbed much faster than that, a customer comparing quotes may notice.

The festive season will pull household money towards gifts and travel, and the August numbers suggest that pull has already started. The firms that keep their diaries full into the new year will be the ones whose quotes make it easy to say yes to something smaller now.