Analysis: ‘Retailers are hoping shoppers will loosen up in the next week’

I THINK the picture is pretty similar to previous years in that it seems pretty busy out there and a lot of the shops have a lot of people in them.

However, it is how much they are buying and how much they are spending that are the interesting questions.

People are being very canny with the money they do have and retailers are hoping they will loosen up in the week running up to Christmas.

There has also been a lot of internet buying, which is something we have seen over the last few years and is continuing to accelerate. What’s different this year is the amount of shopping that is being done on mobiles and that’s something retailers have been keen to take advantage of, so there’s a real mixture of things going on.

People are genuinely concerned about where the economy is headed and are, therefore, spending less. From a retailers perspective, we are seeing the same patterns as we have in recent years, with pre-Christmas sales because retailers are getting worried. So the pattern of sales is not really very different. However, the depth of the discounts across the board seems to be substantial. There’s an awful lot of noise about price out there. It’s genuinely difficult for customers to work out who has the cheapest deals.

In terms of what people are buying, there doesn’t seem to be one must-have item. Last year we had Heston Blumenthal’s chocolate orange Christmas pudding, which was selling on eBay for ridiculous prices. There’s nothing like that this year. There also doesn’t appear to be a must-have Christmas toy this year, as far as I’m aware. There’s nothing that really has the big Christmas buzz around it this year.

• Leigh Sparks is a professor of retail studies at Stirling University.