Picture someone who took a job on a shop floor in 2008. Full-time hours, a name badge, retail pay as the money that covered the rent. That year, 233,202 New Zealanders had retail trade earnings as their main source of income (Source: Stats NZ, earnings-by-industry). It was the highest the industry had ever gone. Then the floor fell away.

By 2012, the count had dropped to 216,738. That is 16,464 fewer people living off retail pay, a fall of about 7 percent in four years. Our hypothetical shop worker either hung on through the lean years or joined the queue somewhere else. The industry did not claw its way back above the 2008 mark until 2017, when it hit 239,997. Nine years to get back to where it started.

Now the good news, and it is genuinely good. The most recent available figures, from 2024, show 254,724 people with retail trade as their main earnings source. That is a record for the 24 years of this series, and it is 71,475 more people than the 183,249 counted in 2000, a rise of 39 percent.

COVID barely dented it by comparison. The count actually edged up in 2020, to 247,356, before falling to 240,306 in 2021. That is a loss of 7,050 people, less than half the damage the GFC did. And the bounce-back was quick: 245,721 in 2022, 250,668 in 2023, then the 2024 record. Three years to recover, not nine.

Here is the part that changes how the record looks. Between 2000 and 2008, retail added roughly 6,200 people a year to its payroll. Between 2012 and 2024, it added roughly 3,200 a year. The industry is bigger than ever, but it is filling up at about half the pace it did before the crisis. The record is real. The momentum behind it is not what it was.

The most likely reading is that retail has become a steady, slow-growing base of the labour market rather than an expanding one. It absorbs people. It just does not absorb them the way it once did.

The honest counter-argument: this is a count of people, not a measure of hours, wages or job quality. Someone working eight hours a week at a bottle shop and someone managing a department both appear as one person if retail is their main earnings source. New Zealand's population has also grown substantially since 2000, so a 39 percent rise in retail earners over 24 years may not mean retail's share of workers has grown at all. And 2024 is the latest year available, so nothing here tells you what the last two Christmases did.

My view: the nine-year GFC gap is the number worth remembering. Retail is the industry a lot of people fall back on when other work dries up, which means it takes the hit early and recovers late. When you hear that a downturn has passed, check the shop floor. In 2008 it took until 2017 for the people on it to get back to square one, and nobody got those nine years back.