Who doesn’t like a bargain when they have the chance? Even though you don’t have enough money, it doesn’t mean than you will lose on a great sale! And what else than a huge ‘discount’ or ‘big sale’ sign to draw the attention of a crowd willing to get their hands on a bargain?As soon as the first day of Christmas is over, the Brits have got their Boxing Day sales, where many people would step on each other to get something nice and cheap. It does sound like a Black Friday, only that it happens after Christmas.And this Christmas, the sales plummeted to a tremendous amount of money spent on new things.A British Invasion… of ShopsThe Centre for Retail Research (CRR) reported that this year people spent about ?4.5 billion on shopping in that one day: Boxing Day. That means that there were over ?8 million per minute spent in the pursue of a great bargain. One of the Centre’s spokesperson said that the rate of spending reached ?8.26million per minute.People from different parts of the country stood in queues of Next stores for many hours before the stores would open at 6am. Basically, right after the Christmas day, instead of going to sleep and enjoy the holiday, they chose to stay outside, in lines, to buy cheaper things.The Bullring shopping Centre from Birmingham was full of 1,000 people who were waiting in line. If that is not impressive, then check this out: the estimations showed that about 23 million Brits got out to shop on Boxing Day. Looking at the entire adult population of the country, that means that half of the country was out shopping.Isn’t that a crowd? And what did they get? Let’s see:Selfridges in Oxford Street sold products of about ?4million in only the first three hours since they opened at 9am.And that’s not all. Even online stores were hit by frenzied shoppers that tried their best to avoid to hit the store and roam around the masses. The online sales were up to ?1 billion, which is about 6% more than last year’s sales. On the Currys PC World’s website in only one hour (10-11am), the traffic of people visiting it rose to more than a half of million visitors.The CRR director, Prof. Joshua Bamfield said that ‘Footfall will be high and homewares and small electronics will sell well’. And he wasn’t mistaken: with offers of top brand boots going for half the price and Debenhams cutting half the price from fragrance and beauty, electrical and homeware, we can only understand why people went crazy that day.You can’t believe your eyes? Check out more about those crazy sales at this link: reproduced with permission from www.buddyloans.com
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