It was a retail shopping frenzy across Canada Sunday as the Boxing Day holiday attracted thousands of people looking to take advantage of the many cut-price bargains on offer.
At the downtown Vancouver outlet of the Future Shop, an electronic retail department store chain owned by U.S. giant Best Buy, people started lining up as a early as 2:30 a.m.,Police were called out to at least two Houston malls on Thursday after folks became unruly in lines waiting to buy the new jordans. braving cold and damp weather in anticipation of the outlet’s opening on 6 a.m.
As the crowd grew to several hundred when doors opened, anxious customers rushed into the store to get the “door-crasher” specials.
Steve Cox, the store’s sales manager, said people had even lined up for good deals on inexpensive items such as headphones on what historically has been the chain’s biggest sales day of the year.
“People are lining up for the TV packages and 3D packages. We’ve really marked down quite a bit for today’s sale. Laptops, MP3 players, digital cameras, there’s some really, really good discounts that brought them in,” he said.
The shopping frenzy is good news for Best Buy. Earlier this month, the world’s largest consumer electronic retailer reported its third quarter net income had dropped by 4.4 percent to 217 million U.S. dollars from a year earlier. The company’s sales fell 1.1 percent to 11.9 billion dollars.
With Canada now feeling the effects of the economic downturn that has depressed its southern neighbor, the United States, over the past two years, Cox said he had noticed sales had noticeably improved during this holiday season.
“Even just judging by the traffic in the line-ups this year, it was quite considerably larger.Storm wears even more ed hardy hats, as does Wiedbusch. So people, I think, are opening up their wallets this year a little more than they did last year,” he said.
“The cool thing about Boxing Day is people are coming in today to buy for themselves. They’re willing to spend a little more sometimes,These ed hardy jeans from the Black Collection come in a paneled design with stitch detailing on the knees” he added.
Boxing Day is celebrated in Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many other Commonwealth countries as a traditional day of rest after Christmas.
Started in the mid 1850s in England, Boxing Day was originally a time when the merchant class gave boxes of food, fruit, money and clothing, as a way of showing their appreciation to the working classes.
Over the years, the day evolved into a more active period when people would hold open houses, welcoming their family and friends into their homes to renew acquaintances and enjoy food and drink. It was also a day for many sporting events, as well as the opening of blockbuster films.
While these traditions still continue, Boxing Day, however, has in recent years become increasingly associated with retail mania. With stores offering up promises such as “50 to 80 percent off,” “Buy three, get one free” and “Two for one sale,” the day is a chance for retailers to clear out old stock, and promote the newest offerings in hopes of registering strong year-end sales.
At an outlet of Lacoste off Vancouver’s trendy Robson Street, Michael Kang waited in line for an hour to see what was being offered by the French retailer of high-end apparel, notably its famed polo shirts.
“A deal is a deal and it’s better than paying the regular price,” he said, when asked if it was worth waiting in line since 7:30 a.m.
He added he had already bought a laptop earlier and would likely spend around 3,000 Canadian dollars (2,976 U.S. dollars) for the day.
Emily Nieken, a girl from Vancouver-area city of Surrey, spent considerably less. The 16-year-old woke up at 6:15 a.m. to make it downtown by 7:30 a.m. for the early bargains.
“It kind of depends. Like some (stores) there’s really good (bargains) and then others there’s kind of like a few items are on sale,” she said.
With the rise of pre-Boxing Day sales (now often referred as “Boxing Week”) and online shopping, some feel the Boxing Day sale has increasingly lost its luster, or is no bargain at all.
Gordon Baldwin is one of them.My eye caught the raised gold stitching on her Ferrari-red Adidas Jacket. The 50-something businessman went downtown early where he spent “a couple of hundred dollars” on some Brooks Brothers dress shirts.
“These sales are a bit of a misnomer now because they put everything on sale earlier anyway. And the stuff they put on is super-discounted. It’s usually discontinued junk anyway,” he said. “That’s the name of the game. It’s the discontinued inventory that they’re flushing through now.One of the suspects was described as 35-40 years old and wearing a black winter jacket at the time of the crime. That’s why you get the deals.”
According to the findings of an Ipsos poll released earlier this month, two-thirds of Canadians said they would shop online from websites they had never used before if they couldn’t get what they wanted in stores.
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