Please spare me the Black Friday hype – it’s just an excuse for retailers to flog stock that isn’t shifting THE MATT COOPER COLUMN

THE phrase ‘Christmas has come early’ springs to mind when hearing all of those adverts for Black Friday, the relatively new, and much-hyped, shopping promotion that’s taking place this week.

The relentless hard sell for November 24 is a response, apparently, to Cyber Monday – which is coming very soon – by what are now called ‘bricks and mortar’ stores. Cyber Monday, in turn, is a slightly older tradition in which people are urged to spend their money on buying things over the internet, but doing so in time for delivery before Christmas.

Those self-same internet retailers, of course, are also trailing their wares for Black Friday, in the hope of capturing some of money that is meant to be kept by the old type retailers from their relatively new competitors.

Complicated, isn’t it? Made even more so by the fact that Amazon, the biggest beast in the online jungle, has opened up a ‘pop up’ store on Oxford Street in London – arguably that city’s most famous shopping destination – for the next few days (before it closes again). Customers aren’t actually able to buy anything there, but they can look and touch and feel supposedly best selling items and then order online.

Carnage

They can also benefit from ‘shopping tutorials’ from ‘social media influencers’, who might also be described as a new thing. They are basically created celebrities, who might occasionally appear in ‘old media’ too. My apologies for all the quotation marks but we’re into a whole lot of new ‘buzz words’ and ‘hot’ phrases here.

How convenient for Amazon that it can hire vacant space on a main street for a short period, sell hard, and then decamp. It’s telling that there is space available.

However, earlier this year Amazon – which made its reputation as an online book store, causing carnage among traditional booksellers, many of whom closed as sales migrated – opened its first physical book store in New York, and has a plan to open many more across the United States. It also bought one of the US’s largest fresh food supermarket chains and, guess what? People have to go there to collect their own food.

It’s hard to keep up with all of this change. I expect all of you will be familiar with Marks & Spencer, one of Britain’s traditional retail giants, one which has a number of popular stores in Ireland. How many of you though are familiar with Asos? I am familiar with it only because my teenage daughters keep begging to use my credit card to make purchases of clothing from there, and I occasionally give in. Asos does not have a single physical store but it now has a higher valuation on the London Stock Exchange than the venerable M&S (a company that has struggled for more than a decade to keep up with changing retail habits and fashion trends).

Semi-Luddite that I am – though, I do stream my music, often buy books via digital download, rather than having the physical copy in my home, and read my Irish Daily Mail every morning, first thing, through the great app on my phone – I struggle to persuade my children to go to a shop to try something on for size. Their view is that if it doesn’t fit they can send it back for something that does, but they complain then that nobody is at home to take delivery of their package and that they have to toddle off to the (nearby) post office to collect it. If this newspaper printed emojis the one with the eyes turned up to heaven would appear here.

Godsend

And what does all of this competition do for you, the consumer? It isn’t necessarily the godsend for consumers either that you might think. Retailers are offering discounts on some products for Black Friday but it is more likely to be the stuff that isn’t shifting at full price.

They use this opportunity to clear their shelves for the stuff they know will be in demand for Christmas – and that they can sell at full price.

The British consumer watchdog, Which?, having tracked prices of 35 selected products over more than a year, claimed earlier this week that 60% of deals are available at either the same price or are cheaper either before or after Black Friday.

No similar survey has been done for Ireland but, given that many of the retailers surveyed in Britain operate here, it would be very surprising if things were any different. So what does all of this change – or to use the fashionable phase ‘disruption’ – actually mean? Last year some Irish retailers complained that their takings for the Christmas period were down because too many of their customers either spent earlier than expected or sent their money out of the country to overseas online sellers.

You could argue that the first element levels out their cash flow, instead of getting it all in a splurge at Christmas, and that it is better for the customer too, their personal finances benefiting from the same spread of spending.

It could also be argued that the Irish shops simply have to improve their online offer to customers, both in range of goods and in prices. That, however, may be easier said than done, because of the scale of operation involved.

Crisis

I still expect the shops to be full between now and year end but what happens after that? The trend towards online shopping seems to be accelerating, as consumers opt for the relative ease of purchase and often better prices.

There are consequences for this, however, particularly in retail employment.

Many shops face a crisis: how can they pay commercial rents and council rates on a year round basis if they find they are only really busy for short bursts during the year? How many jobs will they shed, or expect people to work on a part-time, uncertain hours, basis?

This may be a bigger problem outside of the main cities in particular. Shops in Dublin can offer the range that many shoppers now expect and demand, given what they can see on their phones or tablets, but they may not be able to do so in smaller population clusters. Already many people in rural Ireland drive many miles around Christmas to visit a wider variety of shops with bigger choice. It makes sense but it does little for commerce in rural Ireland.

There is also a social dimension and benefit to shopping that is often overlooked: people converse and interact and do other things such as going to restaurants to eat with family and friends instead of being stuck at home looking at a screen.

So have I fallen for all the hype? Well I’ve bought nothing so far this week and I hope to avoid the traps next week too. As for Christmas itself? I have a strategy that I’ve never been allowed to implement. It’s called waiting for the post-Christmas sales. Every year I’m compelled by my family to buy things for them that might be a lot cheaper if they didn’t have to be wrapped and presented on Christmas Day.

Instead of Christmas coming early I wish I could persuade my friends to be happy with it coming late.