The four year wait, briefly broken
4 February 2026|Written by: Dream Chronicler
In January, for the first time in more than four years, more New Zealanders said it was a good time to buy a major household item than said it was not. The net figure was plus one. A tiny number. A massive moment. It is the first positive reading since October 2021, which is a very long time to go without one.
We took a pause through January to let the year rest and to watch what December actually delivered. What we saw in that window shifts how the January reading should be read. This piece sets out the data, explains why the plus one is meaningful but fragile, and tells the specific story of how the recovery we wrote about before Christmas actually arrived in our warehouse.
What the January reading says
The ANZ Roy Morgan January release came out on 30 January. The headline lifted from 101.5 in December to 107.2 in January. That is the highest reading since August 2021. The “good time to buy a major household item” indicator, the retail sector’s cleanest single read, rose from minus one to plus one. That makes it the first positive print in over four years.
The rest of the release is consistent with the headline. The future conditions index climbed to 113.5, the highest since May 2021. The current conditions index rose to 97.7, the highest since December 2021, and it is now finally within reach of the 100 neutral line. Views on current personal finances improved sharply. Expectations about the year ahead lifted.
Put plainly, the households who have been sitting on delayed bedroom decisions through 2022, 2023, 2024 and most of 2025 are starting to say, in aggregate, that now is not a bad time to make one. This is not the same as saying every household in the country is about to buy a bed. It is saying that the proportion of the country that is ready to think about one has finally tipped above the proportion that is not.
That matters. Retail recovers in increments. The first increment in a long cycle is always the hardest and the most meaningful. The January plus one is that first increment.
Why this is the start, not the arrival
Before anyone gets carried away, three things are worth naming.
The first is that the plus one is a single data point. The four year trajectory from minus twenty in 2022, through the mid teens negatives of 2023 and most of 2024, into the minus fourteen to minus nine range of late 2025, has been slow and uneven. Breaking into positive territory by a single point does not mean the recovery is linear from here. Confidence readings can unwind in a single month. The next release, which covers February, lands in late February. It will tell us much more about whether plus one is a genuine turn or a one month blip.
The second is that the gap between sentiment and actual retail spending is real. The January reading tells us how households feel about the idea of buying. It does not tell us that the cards are being swiped. New Zealand retail data for December and January will not be published for several more weeks. When it arrives, it will tell a more lagged and more mixed story than the sentiment readings do. Sentiment leads spending, but it also overshoots in both directions. The most honest read of the January plus one is that it marks the point where the underlying setup has become constructive. It does not mark the point where the recovery is fully transmitted into cash registers.
The third is that the macro backdrop has not softened. Net migration remains at around the 12,000 level we wrote about in November. Households who left over the last two years are not walking back through the arrivals gate in any meaningful numbers. The raw additional customer tailwind that drove the last cycle is not available this time. The recovery is coming through rate cuts reaching existing households, not through a fresh wave of arrivals.
The specific story behind our December
The December piece we published before Christmas ended with a promise to keep our partners informed on container delays. That was not theoretical. Behind that promise was a specific saga which is worth telling properly, because it is the operational texture of the broader macro story the sentiment numbers are only pointing at.
We had a pre Christmas top up container of key SKUs that was planned to arrive in Auckland on 5 December. That was the plan we had been working to since the ordering decisions were made in October, when we started to see October and November coming in stronger than inventory had been positioned for. The container was booked, the vessel was scheduled, the dates were tight but workable.
The container was bumped off its planned vessel in China. That happens. If it had caught the next vessel out, it would have arrived in Auckland on 14 December, still manageable, still giving us a working week to devan before Christmas. Instead, it was put on a slow vessel transiting through South East Asia. That pushed the revised ETA to 21 December. Still workable. Our team planned to devan on 22 or 23 December, ready for the Boxing Day trading weekend.
On 12 December the shipping agent called. Auckland port was congested around the vessel’s arrival window. The vessel had decided to call Lyttelton before Auckland. The new Auckland ETA was 28 December, two days after Boxing Day.
At that point it became clear that the stock was not going to make it to the customers who had been waiting for it before Christmas, and that the SKUs that had been running lean in early December were going to stay lean right through the end of the year and into the new year. We closed on Friday 19 December for our summer break as usual. The container was still somewhere off Lyttelton.
It finally reached our yard on 30 December. That was a Tuesday, during our scheduled holiday period. Three members of our team came in that day, devanned the container, processed the goods, and got the stock live on our system the same day. By the close of 30 December, the stock that should have been in our warehouse four weeks earlier was finally on hand, visible to retailers checking their ordering systems, available for the first wave of January trade.
We want to say this plainly. The fact that early January trade was not disrupted, that backorders started moving through from 31 December onward, that our partners who had been patient through December were not still waiting in mid January, is because three people gave up a day of their holiday to make it happen. No algorithm, no system, no amount of planning in October could have closed the gap between what the supply chain actually delivered and what December demand actually needed. A handful of people did.
That is not a story we tell often, and it is not a story we are claiming credit for. The three team members who devanned that container on 30 December did what people in this industry have always done when the moment required it. The reason for telling it now is that it is the concrete ground truth version of the broader story the January plus one is hinting at. The recovery is real. The supply chain is stretched. The system is running hotter than its planned capacity. And the human effort at the margin is what closes the gap.
What the January plus one actually needs to translate into more
Three things matter from here.
First, a second positive reading. One plus one is a data point. Two consecutive positive readings is the start of a trend. The February number, published in late February, is the first test.
Second, retail spending data that confirms the sentiment is flowing through. Stats NZ will publish December retail figures within the next few weeks. Whether they show a genuine lift, or whether the early recovery has been more sentiment than transaction, will tell us a great deal about how fast the pick up is actually moving. Our own wholesale numbers will tell us the same thing from a different angle, with a slight lag.
Third, inventory and supply chain restoration. What happened to us in December is representative of what is happening across the industry. Containers running late, stock running lean in unexpected places, last minute improvisation to keep the sale with a local supplier. The industry will spend the first half of 2026 catching its supply chain back up to the pace the consumer has started to set. That is a good problem to have, relative to the alternative, but it is a real problem, and how well suppliers and retailers work through it will determine how much of the January sentiment actually becomes first quarter revenue.
We will be writing more about these three things over the coming months as the data arrives.
What is next
More from us in mid February. There is a lot happening in that window. A new Governor of the Reserve Bank is about to deliver her first Monetary Policy Statement. We will also have the February consumer confidence reading by the end of the month, which will tell us whether January was a true turn or a one off.
In the meantime, our office and warehouse are fully open again. The range is positioned for what we now think is the strongest first quarter the New Zealand bedding industry has seen since 2021. Thank you for the partnership through what was, at the very end of it, a chaotic December. The three people who came in on 30 December deserve most of the credit for the smooth start to 2026.
Sources cited: ANZ Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence, January 2026 release (30 January 2026); Dreamland internal operational records, December 2025 container saga; Stats NZ International Migration, year to September 2025 release; ANZ Roy Morgan Consumer Confidence, December 2025 release (18 December 2025).
