I work in the retail and healthcare sectors and our company has a large amount of our stores across Australia in Westfield Shopping Centres.

Most of our Brisbane stores reported a large number of traffic in the centres. We had the same reports in other states who saw centres a lot busier than the last couple of months. I feel like I saw less bags in people's hands over the weekend.

With all that said though, the retail environment feels a lot different to previous years and there are questions being raised in a lot of our meetings in regards to these differences.

There has been a lot of talk about supply chain issues and troubles with shipping worldwide. This has scared people a bit and we have found that more people are completing their shopping earlier for Christmas. This might mean that we see a decrease in retail spending YoY in the several weeks leading up to Christmas. There was massive talk about Black Friday Sales being this event where shoppers spent all this extra money, but in reality it might turn out that Christmas spending was bought forward to around this time. We may even hear of stores running out of stock in the next few weeks and being unable to get more stock in before Christmas.

It does beg the question of whether Boxing Day will be a big event or whether there will be stock issues to a point where shoppers want to spend money but there isn't the stock levels to match. Obviously time will tell but I believe this holiday period will be unusual in terms of shoppers spending habits and also with store stock levels. Things are also hard to gauge these days with sales like Black Friday and Boxing Day not being limited to a 24h period and instead being a multi-day event.

I was at Westfield Warringah Mall (Sydney) on the weekend with my daughters and it was very busy (both the carpark and the mall) - basically as busy as I would expect pre-covid. I've also been to Macquarie centre and the Chatswood Westfield in the past few weeks and they were both basically as busy as normal pre-covid as well

I was also in the city (CBD) one day last week and also today and it's pretty busy there too. Certainly not back to pre-covid busy but still busier than I was expecting (all the shops are open and appeared to be getting quite a bit of foot traffic, the food halls were packed at lunchtime). Actually the office is significantly quieter/less people, but the streets and shops are busy so perhaps people are coming to the city during the day to Xmas shop?

Little change here in Perth (for obvious reasons). Shops have been consistently busy now for some time, even more so in the lead up to Christmas. So can only see it getting busier.

There is a new Shopping centre in Karrinyup which has near on been the talk of the town (don't ask me why); something to do with an outlet called Sephora...

In saying that I rarely go to the shops myself (hate the places - only go when the missus drags me along).

A colleague was telling me it took him 20 mins to - exit - Westfield Indooroopilly in Brisbane last Sunday.

But to answer the are people really going back to shopping centres, Maybe I'm in a different place to most people, however, I cannot recall the last time I went to one. Other than a weekly visit to Con the Fruiterer and the butcher, everything/anything else is delivered.