Black Friday beats Boxing Day sales
Spending figures for Black Friday show the day has eclipsed Boxing Day as the year’s biggest discount day.
Shoppers reportedly turned out in force at malls and stores for the four-day promotion, which began on Friday and ended with Cyber Monday yesterday.
Emma Smith, general manager of AMP Capital Shopping Centres, said trading had been as busy as the week before Christmas at its malls in Christchurch, Palmerston North, Tauranga and Auckland.
One mall had seen a 40 per cent increase in customers on a normal weekend. ‘‘A lot of retailers are continuing on tomorrow.’’
Paymark, which services the bulk of in-store electronic card terminals, said its spending figures on Friday totalled $253 million, up from $219m last year.
If food and hospitality were excluded, core spending through Paymark on Black Friday was $71.4m, surpassing Boxing Day last year at $63.8m.
With Cyber Monday still under way, shoppers had spent $652m in total during the promotion, up 12.8 per cent on last year.
Black Friday, an American retail tradition which follows Thanksgiving in the United States, now extends to Cyber Monday, a promotion created specifically by online retailers.
New Zealand retailers picked up on it several years ago to stop losing Kiwi shoppers to Black Friday sales online overseas.
Retail NZ spokesman Greg Harford said Black Friday’s success would provide a welcome boost for the sluggish retail scene.
‘‘A huge number of retailers are getting in on the act, much more than ever before, and I think possibly it’s provided a much needed boost for the sector before Christmas.’’
Consumers had been being careful with their cash for the last couple of years, which was likely because of rising fixed costs, like rates, insurance, petrol and rents, he said. Despite the popularity of Black Friday and Boxing Day, the last seven days before Christmas are traditionally the busiest shopping days of the year. Retail sales in the build-up to Christmas are tracking 3.4 per cent ahead of last year, so far.
Price comparison site PriceSpy said almost half of the Kiwis it surveyed recently planned to buy something during the Black Friday sales, and uptake on its site showed that stores were getting aggressive, slashing prices ahead of the day. But the site’s country manager, Liisa Matinvesi-Bassett, said shoppers had to be careful, as last year some prices actually increased over the Black Friday sale weekend.
The Commerce Commission says retailers who misled consumers about the price of goods risk breaching the Fair Trading Act and being fined up to $600,000.
The commission said it was not easy to check if it had received any complaints of inflated pricing but it had received 11 complaints in the last seven days which mentioned ‘‘Black Friday,’’ of which eight also mentioned ‘‘price’’.
A complaint did not actually mean the law had been breached.