THE BLACK FRIDAY FLOP
Deserted high street stores left with piles of unsold goods as shoppers go online for £1billion bargain spree
BLACK Friday became bleak Friday for high street stores as families shopped online instead.
Discounts of up to 60 per cent saw internet takings pass the £1billion-a-day mark for the first time.
Demand was so high that the websites of major retailers stalled or crashed. John Lewis’s went down, costing it an estimated £2.8million in lost sales. Argos customers were met with repeated error messages online.
And frustrated customers tweeted their anger following web problems at Tesco, Boots and Debenhams.
The final online sales figure was expected to be more than 30 per cent better than last year’s £810million.
But on high streets and in shopping centres the expected US-style frenzy failed to materialise. Last year there were ugly scenes as enormous crowds pushed, shoved and fought over cutprice TVs from midnight.
This year, store openings were delayed until 5am, the crowds were sparse, car parks deserted and the relatively small queues were orderly.
‘Black Friday is the worst thing we have ever imported from the US,’ said
consumer analyst Richard Hyman. He said it caused enormous disruption to normal trading patterns, forced retailers to slash profit margins and created a delivery backlog.
Springboard, which counts shopper numbers, said footfall was down by 8.9 per cent in retail parks, 6.5 per cent in high streets and 4.6 per cent in shopping centres.
Many of those who had bothered to queue – some in their pyjamas – were disappointed at the scale of the discounts. A year ago, stores called for police help to quell unruly crowds, arrests were made and shoppers were kicked and punched in the bargain hunting melee.
One woman was knocked to the floor by a group of teenagers at Asda in Wembley as they tried to grab a 40in TV from her – it had been reduced by £80 to £139. Tesco was heavily criti- cised by the police for failing to have enough security staff to cope with a midnight opening last year.
Yesterday it delayed the opening until 5am, had more staff on the doors and regulated numbers with a ticketing system. The number of shoppers was so low in many locations that the controls became unnecessary.
Retailers will have no choice but to try to shift the mountains of leftover stock through a series of flash sales between now and Christmas – and then in the January sales.
While the streets were relatively quiet, online retailers broke all records in terms of the value and number of sales. The John Lewis site appeared to go down for a period just after 3pm.
One disgruntled customer called to confirm a purchase and was told to call back in an hour.
A spokesman said last night: ‘There are record levels of demand for our website today and for some people it
is taking longer than normal to shop. We apologise to customers for any inconvenience.’
The Argos site also crashed sev- eral times and users were confronted with a holding page saying: ‘Oops...Sorry to hold you up.’
One would-be customer tweeted: ‘Shouldn’t advertise doing Black Friday if your website can’t handle it. Trying to pay and keeps crashing’. The chain asked shoppers to ‘sit tight’ pending confirmation of their purchases.
Appliance seller AO.com said its online orders were running at double the rate seen last year.
Big sellers included food proces- sors, juicers, TVs and vacuum cleaners. Currys-PC World said its website was 1,100 per cent busier than last year with orders up a staggering 2,900 per cent. Particularly popular was a deal offering £30 off Apple iPads.
One woman shopper in Burnley said: ‘I haven’t been to sleep, I’ve been up all night shopping. I had the laptop, tablet and mobiles on looking for bargains. We are just greedy.’ She estimated she had saved £1,500-£2,000 on gifts, including games consoles.
An eBay spokesman said: ‘Sellers are reporting a dramatic lift in sales with one in particular telling us that their sales between 8am and 10am today exceeded the entirety of those on Black Friday 2014.’
Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, the fourth Thursday of November. Since at least the 1930s it has been regarded as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season there.
One theory to explain the term is that it is when stores go into the black for the year’s trading.
Nick Bubb, who is a retail analyst, said: ‘It looks as if Black Friday spending has been more spread out this year and more weighted to online, but every indication is that the combined event will be bigger than last year.’
Patrick Gallagher, chief executive of courier company CitySprint, said: ‘It may be quiet on the high street, but that does not mean consumers are not buying in force.
‘The majority are likely spending online instead of in-store, especially as retailers have tried to avoid the dramatic scenes we saw last year.’
The police warned that the switch to online shopping has created an opportunity for criminals.
The Metropolitan Police’s cyber crime unit Falcon said some hackers who have been able to obtain personal details and passwords save them for use on Black Friday.
A 28-year-old man was arrested in Middlesbrough yesterday after Tesco found someone trying to use stolen details on its website.
‘Causes enormous
disruption’