LONDON – British shoppers spent more last month even as worries about the global econ-omy grew in the run-up to US President Donald Trump’s tariff in-creases, according to data published on Tuesday.
The British Retail Consortium said sales at its member stores – mostly large re-tail chains – rose by 1.1 percent year-on-year in March, matching February’s in-crease.
The increase would have been bigger were it not for the Easter holiday falling in April this year unlike in 2024 when it was in March, boosting sales in that month, the BRC said.
“Despite a challenging global geopolitical landscape, the small increase in both food and non-food sales masked signs of underlying strengthening of demand,” BRC chief executive Helen Dickinson said.
A separate measure of overall consumer spending published by Barclays painted a less up-beat picture.
Barclays said spending rose by 0.5 percent in March compared with the same month last year, slowing from February’s 1.0 percent increase and weaker than the rate of inflation. However, its figures also did not adjust for Easter falling in different months in 2024 and 2025.
Warm weather helped garden centres and specialist food and drink shops but supermarket sales were down by 2.6 percent.
Jack Meaning, chief UK economist at Barclays, said a drop in confidence among consum-ers highlighted the risk of a pullback in spending in the coming months.
“We expect spending to remain muted through mid-2025, before picking up into 2026 as interest rates easing starts to be felt and uncertainty begins to normalise,” Meaning said.
Two in three of consumers surveyed by Barclays after Trump’s tariff increase announce-ment earlier this month were worried that imported products would become more expensive and 71 percent said they planned to buy more “Made in Britain” items.
A third survey published on Tuesday showed company bosses turned negative on the out-look for the first time since the end of 2022 as worries about a tax in-crease on employers added to the concerns about Trump’s tariffs.
