While soaring bills put household spending on ice, New Zealand's wholesale traders had their biggest year on record. The sector earned $98.4 billion in 2024, up from $94.7 billion the year before. (Source: Stats NZ, earnings-by-industry)

That's an extra $3.7 billion flowing through the middlemen who sit between manufacturers and the shops where you buy your groceries, furniture, and hardware. The people who never touch a customer but take a cut of everything.

Here's the tension: retailers keep telling us they're squeezed. Costs are up, margins are thin, they can't afford to drop prices even as Kiwi households cut back on spending. Yet the wholesale sector, the layer that supplies those same retailers, just posted its seventh consecutive year of growth.

Go back to 2020, before the pandemic reshuffled everything. Wholesale earnings sat at $80.5 billion. Four years later, they're up 22%. That's not inflation adjustment, that's actual dollars paid to wholesalers for moving goods around the country.

The wholesale sector doesn't make things. It doesn't sell to you. It buys from producers and sells to retailers, adding margin at each step. When wholesale earnings grow by $18 billion in four years while households are reportedly tightening belts, someone's absorbing that cost. Either retailers are passing it straight through to you, or they're eating into their own margins and complaining about it loudly.

The numbers suggest it's the former. Between 2023 and 2024 alone, wholesale earnings jumped $3.7 billion. That's $10 million extra per day flowing through a sector that exists purely to facilitate transactions between other businesses.

This isn't about vilifying wholesalers. They provide logistics, warehousing, credit lines. They're part of how goods move. But when the sector posts record earnings year after year while retailers claim poverty and households cut spending, the arithmetic doesn't reconcile.

Either wholesale margins are growing while retail margins shrink, which seems unlikely given retailers' public complaints. Or the entire supply chain is extracting more value while passing costs down to consumers who, according to the same news cycle, can barely afford their power bills.

The wholesale data doesn't explain where that $98.4 billion went. It doesn't break down margins versus volume. But it does establish one clear fact: the people moving goods around New Zealand had a very good 2024, even as the people buying those goods reportedly struggled.

Next time a retailer tells you they can't afford to lower prices, ask them about their wholesale bills. The data suggests those bills are growing, but so is the sector charging them.