Shoppers to spend £705m on Black Friday weekend

Warning festive frenzy will be no magic wand for struggling high street stores

Scottish shoppers will splash a record £6.8 billion by Christmas as Black Friday kickstarts spending, but crisis-hit high street chains were warned the festive splurge is not a magic wand to save them.

The Black Friday weekend will see £705 million spent in Scotland.

However, pre-Christmas price reductions of up to 88% are cutting struggling stores’ profit margins to the bone, according to a Centre for Retail Research study for VoucherCodes, based on briefings with 50 major retailers and 1,000 shopper interviews.

Black Friday this week will see £207m spent in Scotland, with Cyber Monday next week seeing a further £252m of goods bought in a four-day spree totalling £705m.

That would be up 6% on last year, said the Centre for Retail Research.

The £6.77bn record spend in Scotland in the six weeks to Christmas Eve will be up 1.2% on last year’s £6.69bn.

But high streets’ share of festive spending will actually fall by around 2% year-on-year to £4.5bn.

Online spending will leap by around 10% to £2.2bn.

Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the Centre for Retail Research, said: “Retail sales overall will rise this Christmas – but that is due to increased online spending, as high streets’ share of spending will be down.

“The increase in spending over the Christmas period is not a magic wand to solve the problems of many struggling retailers.

“Black Friday discounts well before Christmas mean lower profit margins.”

The British Retail Consortium said: “There is more competition and higher costs for high streets, with a decline in footfall as consumers shop online. Conditions are tough.”

Conditions are tough.

BRITISH RETAIL CONSORTIUM

Picture: PA. A high-lift platform raises up so that a worker can pick items to be shipped at Amazon’s fulfilment centre in Swansea, in the run-up to Black Friday.