You can’t fail to have noticed that ‘Black Friday’ took place at the end of last week – this is where some of the biggest retailers heavily discount their products, mainly electronic goods, with swarms of people seen to be queueing to get into stores across the UK.
Some of the figures that you see are incredible. For instance, Amazon sold the equivalent of 86 items per second on Black Friday, netting over £7m in sales, making it their best ever UK trading day. As a whole in the UK, we were spending the equivalent of around £12,000 per second on our Black Friday deals.
Whether we get value for money on Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals, however, is open for discussion. Retailers will occasionally sell items at less than cost price in order to grab the headlines and have some ‘loss-leaders’ – if you can entice people into your store in the hope that they will get a deal, the mentality is that EVERYTHING in the shop is reduced and so your mindset changes. Black Friday deals are based on the limited supply concept – if something is in short supply, then its perceived value goes up.
Today is Cyber Monday – traditionally the biggest online shopping day of the year. People’s thoughts are now turning to Christmas, if they haven’t done so already – you can see this by the amount of Christmas lights that went up this weekend!
With the growing confidence on the internet and an ever-increasing percentage of the population on superfast broadband, it’s expected that today’s Cyber Monday will again break all records.
