Yahoo Finance Shops hope for Boxing Day sales spree despite ailing high streets
Millions of Brits are expected to head to the shops for the Boxing Day sales, despite ailing high streets and Black Friday’s online spending spree.
Bargain prices on products like Echo Dots, convertible car seats and the Harry Potter: Complete 8-Film Collection on Blu-Ray by online retailers seduced consumers on the discount shopping day last month, and led to a small 1.4% boost in sales compared with October.
Britain’s high streets largely missed out on this boost, in keeping with a long-term trends. However, many of the country’s biggest shopping centres are remaining hopeful about their Boxing Day prospects, predicting huge crowds as they slash the price of winter stock to make way for spring ranges.
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Westfield is expecting more than 300,000 visitors to its two London centres, while Intu, which owns 17 shopping centres including Manchester’s Trafford Centre and Gateshead’s Metrocentre, is expecting a whopping one million at least.
Gordon McKinnon, Intu’s operations director, said: “Some stores have been running promotions or discounting before Christmas, but Boxing Day is when the clearance sales start in earnest. Retailers have to reduce prices – and sometimes significantly – to clear their autumn and winter stock and customers know that.”
Boxing Day sales have been greatly impacted since the decision to import the US Black Friday holiday into the UK in 2012. Experts have called it a “tide surge” that sucks sales out of the weeks before and after the event.
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Shoppers could be out in full force this year, if the dozens of shoppers that queued outside Burton upon Trent’s Next store from 2am for 6am opening, is anything to go by.
Despite this, retail intelligence company Springboard predicts the number of Brits shopping on Boxing Day will be down 5.2% – following on from last year’s 4.5% drop – and that 27 December will see bigger footfall.
Diane Wehrle, marketing and insights director at Springboard, said: “Post-Christmas shopping generally appears to be diminishing in importance. Footfall on Boxing Day has declined in five out of the past nine years, and the decline has become larger over the last two years.
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“Modern families are complicated, so people may see the other side of their family on Boxing Day. It’s a two-day Christmas, but by the 27th, they have done all that and want to go out and do something else.”
Research by Barclaycard suggests that shoppers are gearing up for a spending splurge this Boxing Day, with three in 10 adults planning to hit the sales. However, its figures show that high street stores could be in for yet another disappointment, as almost 70% of those who plan to shop in the sales say they will make the majority of purchases online – up from 42% in 2017.
But McKinnon is optimistic that high streets will be resilient. “People want the all-round Christmas experience: the decorations, the choirs and bands, the festive stalls, rounding off with a drink of meal,” he said. “You can’t get that doing your shopping on a computer.”
