Black Friday is the thief of retailers’ Christmas gladness

For Dr Seuss it was the Grinch that stole Christmas in order to put an end to the festive cheer of the residents of Whoville. Now modern-day retailers have found their own way to stop Christmas from coming: Black Friday, the discount bonanza that today rivals Advent for its role in the countdown to the big day. The online US import certainly cast a big shadow over the shops in the run-up to Christmas 2019, and next week we will start to see how some of the high street’s biggest names, from Marks & Spencer to John Lewis and Tesco, traded their way through a choppy landscape of clothing discounts and food discounters. Analysts say the absence of profit warnings at this stage is encouraging for investors, but expectations are low after two years of effectively recessionary behaviour by UK consumers. Any pockets of exuberance were snuffed out by Next boss Simon Wolfson, who last Friday wisely pointed out: “There isn’t a special Christmas consumer confidence versus the-rest-of-the-year confidence.” The monthly high street sales barometer produced by consultancy BDO helps sketch out the landscape: it detected only a marginal increase in store sales in December despite what it calls “extreme… Read full this story

Black Friday is the thief of retailers’ Christmas gladness have 312 words, post on www.theguardian.com at January 5, 2020. This is cached page on SEO. If you want remove this page, please contact us.