Last week’s spending data left one question open: whether the education surge that opened the school year would fade as quickly as it arrived. The answer, in the central bank’s new weekly print, is that it did something more interesting. It held. Point of sale spending in the week ended August 29 rose 11.5 percent to SR15.80 billion, among the strongest weekly readings of the year, across 255 million transactions. Education spending, which had more than doubled the week before, added another 5 percent to reach SR1.1 billion. Term fees are not a single checkout; they arrive in waves, and the second wave was still landing.
The larger story is breadth. Food and beverage purchases jumped 22.8 percent to SR2.59 billion. Clothing and footwear rose 11.8 percent to SR1.41 billion. Spending at gas stations climbed 11.7 percent, transportation 9.2 percent, telecommunications 26.7 percent, and bookstores and stationers 28.7 percent. Restaurants and cafes, the steadiest line in the series, added 6.7 percent to reach SR1.78 billion. None of these is a school fee, and all of them are the school run: the fuel, groceries, uniforms and phone plans of households resuming their term-time rhythm at once. The doubling of education outlays made the previous week’s headline. The routine economy reassembling itself around the school day made this one’s.
The mirror image confirms the reading. The two categories that fell were hotels, down 7.4 percent, and jewelry, down 8.6 percent: the discretionary signature of the summer season closing as the routine one reopens. Consumer spending did not simply grow this week. It rotated, out of travel and occasions and into logistics.
Geography tells the same story from another angle. Riyadh, the largest market, grew 7.2 percent to SR5.5 billion, while Jeddah rose 17.6 percent, Makkah 17.2 percent and Madinah 19 percent. The capital’s base is bigger and steadier, so its percentage moves are smaller. The western cities, whose summers run on travel and pilgrimage more than office routine, snapped back harder once the school calendar resumed.
What the print is not, on the available evidence, is inflation. Talat Hafiz, the Saudi economist, read the rise as stronger consumer activity rather than higher prices, pointing to annual inflation running at 1.8 percent. Transaction volumes support him: the number of payments grew 7.6 percent, so much of the increase came from people buying more often, not paying more each time. The weekly point of sale series is the highest-frequency public gauge of the Saudi household economy, and what it currently shows is a consumer base that absorbed the fee season and kept spending through it.
The next few prints carry the more durable information. September’s weeks will show where term-time spending settles once the fee waves pass, which is the baseline retailers and restaurant operators will plan the autumn against. The central bank’s August monthly bulletin, due toward the end of the month, will show whether deposits and consumer credit moved with the cards. The school year has restarted the Kingdom’s consumption engine. What the data answers next is the speed it settles at.