It’s enough to make Gerry Harvey weep. Far from taking off, as new hardware and software arrives in the marketplace and households recover from Christmas spending, retail spending by Australians on electrical and electronic equipment fell in March, according to the latest monthly retail figures published yesterday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

It wasn’t much of a drop – just 1.1 percent. But, by contrast, expenditure was up for food items (1.2 percent), cafés, restaurants and takeaway food services (1.1pc), department stores (2.5 pc), footwear, personal accessories and other household goods (0.4pc) and clothing, footwear and personal accessory retailing.

The bureau doesn’t seek to explain its figures, but it could be that the market has been near-saturated with smartphones, laptops, new software and tablets; rents, meals and other household prices are up, and perhaps many people have decided to be satisfied with the gear and the software they have.

A separate finding published by Stats yesterday shows Australia is continuing to shrink, financially speaking. The monthly figures for private (ie, non-government) capital expenditure on building, structures, equipment, plant and machinery in March show total spending down by 9.1 percent in the month.