Talysis data reveals tough Christmas in convenience
DATE: 12 January, 2026 // BACK TO ARCHIVE »
Talysis, the UK’s specialist convenience insight agency, has unveiled its festive findings as part of an overarching review of the Convenience sector in 2025.
Clarity by Talysis is based on EPoS data from 1000s of independent & symbol group convenience stores, throughout the UK. It is updated weekly, only four days in arrears and provides full barcode and transactional insight into the UK Convenience channel.
The Christmas and New Year performance reveals that it’s been a pretty tough festive period in convenience (4 weeks up to 4 January 2026 versus the same period the previous year), with total value sales in stores down by 2.5% (£41m) and footfall during Christmas week itself down by 5.6% year on year. The single biggest factor driving the decline was the tobacco/vape category, with sales down by 7.5% (almost £40.9m) year on year over the festive period. Although the majority of this decline was on ‘traditional’ cigarettes & tobacco -8.6% (almost £36m), the disposable vape ban also hasn’t helped. Over the past few years, this sub-category has helped to replace some of the lost sales from cigarettes & tobacco, but in Christmas 2025, the vape category itself was also down by -7.6% (£7.5m).
More positively, other ‘typical’ convenience categories have seen good growth year on year over the festive period, with Soft Drinks +3.9% and Confectionery +5.2% (value), albeit inflation is masking reduced volume sales in the latter. It’s abundantly clear however that shoppers still favour supermarkets over convenience stores for grocery shopping at Christmas, with Grocery Chilled sales down by 5.8% and Grocery Ambient down by 4.5% (value).
In the Christmas spirit
Alcohol value sales are fairly flat versus the previous year (-0.8%), although a fierce battle is fought between beer and spirits each year. For 50 weeks of the year, beer is the biggest category in alcohol, but for the last two years, spirits have outsold beer over the Christmas and New Year weeks. In the 4 weeks to 5 January 2025, beer accounted for 31% of sales versus spirits with 32.3% (value). In the same period up to 4 January 2026, both categories had lost some share of the alcohol category, due to the rise in popularity of RTDs, but beer achieved a 29.9% share of sales and spirits accounted for 32.1% (value).
The star of the show is RTD, with sales +30.1% in the 4 weeks to 4 January 2026 versus prior year, growing its share of alcohol from 6.4% to 8.2% in the process. It has currently overtaken cider, which has a 4 week share of 7.9% (up to 4 January 2026). During Christmas week (week commencing 22 December), RTD outsold cider for the second time this year, with sales of £8.8 million against £7.8 million for cider. With New Year starting in the same vein, this looks set to become a more regular occurrence during 2026, especially around ‘occasions’, such as Halloween, which was the other week in 2025 where RTDs outsold Cider.
Continuing to look at Christmas week specifically, this was a huge week for spirits, with sales up from £24 million in week 51 to £37 million in week 52 (w/c 22nd December) although year on year sales over Christmas remained static.
Celebrate good tubs!
Despite the usual promotional battles on Christmas tubs across the supermarkets, which saw
tubs sell for as little as £3.95 at times in Morrisons, Tesco and Sainsburys and where the maximum price never breached £7 (Asda consistently sold at £4.42-£4.92), there was some good news for the Convenience channel. Despite not being able to compete on price (average price in Convenience at Christmas this year was £7.08), sales of the four most popular tubs (Celebrations, Quality Street, Roses, Heroes) reached £1.2 million during Christmas week (w/c 22 December) versus £700k the week before and £900k in Christmas week 2024. This suggests
that shoppers are continuing to use convenience for those “forgotten” essentials or gifts.
Disposables ban still impacting sector
Clarity has also revealed some interesting insights on the Tobacco & Smoking Alternatives category. As flagged earlier, the vape ban hasn’t helped the decline in this category. Retailers have been hit by the ban, not because consumption is necessarily less, but because the formats have changed. Previously, customers were paying £5-£6 for one 2ml vape. They can now (if they want to recycle) buy 2x2ml pods for the same price, resulting in a double whammy of reducing store visits/footfall as well as retailer income overall.
In addition, this is the first week in a while where unit sales of kits (a 2ml re-usable vape) have outsold the pods. These 2ml kits, essentially a ready-to-go vape, saw sales of 1 million units in Christmas week, showing that there is still a huge demand for ready to use products. This change in shopper behaviour over Christmas is likely due to people being out and about, caring more about convenience and less about re-using.
Christmas dinner – still the realm of the supermarkets
Prior to Christmas, Talysis used its PriceCube solution to delve into Christmas Dinner costs in the supermarkets. Taking a typical Christmas dinner basket with all the essentials for a family of four, the data revealed a fall in the average basket of -1.6% year on year, from £46.93 in 2024 to £46.17 in 2025 (based on advertised prices as at 17 December).
Asda, Aldi and Morrisons were all cheaper year on year, with Morrisons recording the largest fall at almost 16%. However, prices were up at Sainsburys and Tesco, with the latter showing the biggest price rise, in excess of 3% versus 2024.
Too soon? Most definitely not!
And finally, one of the more surprising insights from the Christmas review uncovered that retailers shouldn’t wait until after the festivities to get at least one Easter SKU out in-store. For w/c 15th December, Crème Egg sales (£177k) were around 40% of their peak weekly Easter sales (£450k) in convenience. Even during Christmas week (including Christmas Day) there were £125k of Crème egg sales!
Ed Roberts, MD of Talysis Ltd, comments:
“This is such a challenging time for independent and symbol retailers and the disposable vaping ban is having a significant impact, not only on that category, but on a wider basis affecting both footfall and turnover.
“Our data presents a true picture of what Christmas means in convenience and it’s clear that the opportunity lies in differentiating the offer from the supermarkets. There’s not a huge shift in buyer behaviour in convenience at Christmas, so the trick is in getting the basics right and not forgetting your core business. Stock up and display what shoppers want from convenience stores over this period – focus strongly on impulse and make sure you don’t neglect your usual categories. Christmas tubs, for instance, appear only to serve as a distress purchase in convenience, so retailers may well be advised to focus their efforts on their core business.
“We’re looking forward to unveiling our full Convenience Review of 2025 in the near future. It’s the most wide-ranging and insightful report available on the sector, based on accurate, robust and up to date information.”
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