Global giants are thriving in New Zealand’s retail landscape – but a Christchurch startup hopes there’s still room for something different.
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Ikea’s teething problems, Costco’s coming of age
When Ikea opened at Sylvia Park on December 4, New Zealanders responded like a country long starved of reasonably priced flatpack furniture. Aimee Shaw reports in The Post (paywalled) that half a million customers visited the store in its first month and 1.9 million went to its website, demand that smashed expectations and briefly broke the retailer’s systems. Some fans described the launch as “chaotic on several levels” and “baffling” for such a seasoned global operator. Ikea NZ manager Johanna Cederlöf said opening the store and full online shopping on the same day – a first for Ikea anywhere – combined with a brand new team left it “a bit overwhelmed” and struggling to complete all the required picking in the opening week, but insisted there was “no stock issue”, just the challenge of moving product from warehouse to shelves fast enough while thousands shopped both online and in store.
Costco, in contrast, is a few years down the road from opening-day chaos and now showing what happens when a big-box newcomer beds in. Erin Johnson reports for Stuff that the company has posted a $9.6m profit in its third year of trading from a single Westgate warehouse. Supermarket News notes that moving into the black with just one store strengthens the case for expansion. Costco is in the early stages of planning for a second site at Drury in South Auckland, intended to serve both the city’s south and Waikato.
Queen St’s glittering new tenants
On Queen St in Auckland, a different kind of multinational retail is taking shape. In the Herald (paywalled), Tom Raynel reports that lower Queen Street is now home to a swathe of luxury retailers, including Prada, Dior and Louis Vuitton, with Cartier confirmed to open in autumn and another yet-to-be-named luxury retailer close to announcing plans. Into this cluster will arrive Faradays, a $30m three-level, 3,000 square metre department store at 131 Queen St, in the heritage Milne & Choyce building, which co-founder Eddie von Dadelszen says will offer a range of “curated, independent luxury formats” plus a restaurant and swish add-ons like valet parking.
Veteran fashion PR Murray Bevan says he’s excited about Faradays but is worried the luxury boom is squeezing out locals. “We’re losing the nuance of that tapestry of local brands, which used to make up more than probably 50% of people’s shopping carts. I worry that the social media algorithm is teaching us that actually bigger is better.”
The yellow pharmacy reshaping NZ retail
While luxury brands are colonising Queen Street, Chemist Warehouse has transformed the shopping experience nearly everywhere else. In The Spinoff, Alex Casey tracks the rise of the “big yellow discount pharmacy” from a single St Lukes outlet in 2017 to 68 stores nationwide by late 2025, including 35 in Auckland and pairs of branches just a few hundred metres apart in multiple parts of the country. That, she notes, represents an expansion of 6,700% in eight years. The human cost is real: Independent Pharmacy Group retail scientist John Saywell tells Casey that about 150 owner-operated pharmacies have closed in the past five years, and that competing on price is impossible when big chains can soak up hundreds of qualified staff and absorb fees that cost the average pharmacy around $100,000 a year if they try to match them.
To illustrate just how wild the growth looks on paper, Casey unveils “highly credible independent modelling” by The Spinoff’s “data division” that projects, tongue firmly in cheek, 21,381,376 Chemist Warehouses by 2049 if current trends continue – a joke, she stresses, but one aimed at a serious question about how many yellow sheds a small country actually needs. Just today it emerged that the company has purchased the site of the Parāoa Brewing Co, a brewery and performance venue on the Hibiscus Coast, after the brewery lost its liquor licence due to noise complaints.
Kai Co’s local counter-offer
In Christchurch, one local operator is trying to push in the other direction. At Northwood Supa Centa, 32-year-old Ethan Vickery and his father have opened Kai Co, a supermarket pitched explicitly as a lower-cost alternative to the Woolworths–Foodstuffs duopoly. Amber Allott reports in The Press (paywalled) that shoppers “turned out in droves”, with sales more than double what the owners had budgeted for and Vickery describing the demand as “insane” and “surreal”. A price check by The Press found Kai Co was cheaper than or equal to a nearby Pak’nSave on seven of nine staples.
Vickery is already hiring more staff and fielding calls from suppliers who initially “didn’t know what we were trying to do”, and says the long-term dream is to expand within Canterbury while wrestling with a question that cuts to the heart of New Zealand’s uneasy relationship with multinational retail: “How do we replicate what makes this place special elsewhere, without becoming what we hate?”
