By Max Gebhardt

David Sussman, the chief executive of furniture group JD Group, said earlier this year that he expected the strong consumer demand, fuelled by the five rate cuts last year, to really start kicking in from the middle of this year.

Steve Ross, the chief executive of clothing retail chain Edgars Consolidated Stores, said yesterday with the release of that company's trading update that the board thought group sales "will continue to show meaningful growth".

A pretty impressive statement, given that Edgars had just forecast that growth in earnings for the half year would be up by between 60 percent and 80 percent.

Of course, some of this growth is coming through a focus on operational issues, but it is also a clear sign of that buoyant demand Sussman spoke about.

Woolworths painted the same sort of picture earlier in the week, when it said its group sales had risen by more than 15 percent in the first six months of the year, with particularly strong growth of nearly 20 percent in its food division.

Just as an aside, it looks like Woolworths shareholders might be in for a special dividend after it said in its trading statement that it was considering ways "to dispose of surplus funds".

Last week Amalgamated Appliances, which sells white goods and electronics, reported a similar pattern.

The trading updates from the various retail groups have shown the same consistent pattern for a while: a high level of consumer spending.

The puzzler, though, was the retail statistics for April, released yesterday, which showed a slowdown in sales.

Although the rate of increase is positive at 4.4 percent, it is down from March and could indicate that demand for retail products is starting to wane.

In addition, as Nico Kelder of Efficient Research pointed out, in real terms the growth drops to a paltry 1.8 percent. Not the sort of level one imagines would spark the sort of growth rates we are seeing reported by the various listed retail firms.

So how does one explain away this anomaly?

Kelder argues that consumers are starting to shift their spending towards bigger-ticket items like houses and cars.

This is a normal progression of spending patterns, according to his colleague Dawie Roodt, and what it really means is that the rate of growth in retail spending would in all likelihood start to slow.

The real impact, though, is that interest rates might remain unchanged for now if the May and June data show a similar pattern, which would be further good news for the retailers.

For those wanting to know whether the sector still offers value, the chief investment strategist at Sasfin Frankel Pollack Securities says the sector in general is not expensively priced and comes with a healthy dividend. MG