Canadian retailers expect record holiday sales
Friday predicted to be the busiest shopping day of year
It’s beginning to look a lot like a recordbreaking holiday shopping season, with both stores and online retailers posting very merry sales.
On the heels of Canada’s most profitable Black Friday yet, Moneris, the country’s largest debit and credit card payment processing firm, predicts that Friday will be the busiest shopping day of 2018, peaking at 2 p.m.
“There are three factors contributing to this,” Jeff Guthrie, chief sales and marketing officer with Moneris, explained.
“By this Friday, online shopping gets too tight as far as delivery goes in getting a package by the 24th, so if you’ve procrastinated, by Friday you’ll be going to the store.
“Secondly, you have people prepping for the entire week ahead, and that’s why
we see more spending not only in gift purchases, but also in grocery and everyday spending heading into a holiday week.
“And the third factor is that people are just running out of time,” Guthrie added.
“Last year we saw sales falling 14 per cent on the Saturday and 40 per cent on the Sunday, and of course Christmas Eve has restricted shopping hours,” Guthrie said.
“The peak time is 2 o’clock in the afternoon because that’s when everything is open right across the country.”
While the Canada Post labour dispute slowed mail delivery, affecting online shopping, stores and shopping malls were ready to pick up some of the slack this year.
“It would be remarkable if we weren’t having the biggest holiday season ever,” said Karl Lit- tler, vice-president of public affairs for the Retail Council of Canada. “We’ve got a pretty strong feeling of confidence among retailers.”
Littler pointed to the relative strength of the economy, with record low unemployment and negligible inflation as some of the reasons for the robust shopping season.
“No question that there’s more foot traffic, but bear in mind the malls aren’t getting flooded by people moving away from e-commerce,” he added. “It’s not like the volume of ecommerce is high enough that it would completely spike the foot traffic in malls.”
He noted that online shopping still makes up on average about 10 per cent annually.
“But that amount rises substantially over the holidays, when people face the need to make a lot of purchases in a short period and the sort of things purchased are typically easily shippable.”
The retail council’s 2018 holiday shopping survey conducted by Leger, which was released in November, showed that Canadians on average planned to do about three-quarters (74 per cent) of their holiday shopping in stores and 26 per cent online.
“If you look at Black Friday, every suggestion says” this is shaping up to be a recordbreaking shopping season, said Moneris’s Guthrie.
According to Moneris’s data, this year’s Black Friday sales increased about 7 per cent over 2017 in Ontario, the third-biggest jump, with 10 per cent growth in Quebec and 11 per cent in Manitoba. The figure is about 6 per cent nationally.
Both Moneris and retail council studies have shown that Black Friday has outpaced Boxing Day as the biggest shopping period of the year in Canada. That trend began about five years ago, Guthrie said.