Cash Strapped and Still Spending
Retailers are rubbing their hands this Monday morning, following the last weekend before Christmas. It seems that eager shoppers were more keen even than last year to get out, in spite of adverse weather conditions in many places.
The weekend got off to a spend-happy start with Friday 18th December being the busiest day for cash withdrawals this year. In the house between 12pm and 1pm, the great British public withdrew £24000 every second! And it’s this cash that was used to line the tills of the country’s biggest retailers.
Despite a year that has seen over 700000 jobs lost, the Brits are still happy to spend, spend, spend across the festive season, with John Lewis reporting an increase in sales of 15% on last year! Capital Shopping Centres, the company who own the Metro Centre in Gateshead and a number of others around the country have recorded 7 million people visiting their centres in the last week.
Of course, what remains to be seen is how much of this Christmas spending will return to haunt consumers in the New Year. January is typically a month which sees the highest number of debt defaults. However, experts are warning that, after a financially dismal 2009 and an extremely high number of job losses, that January 2010 could be a record breaker in all the wrong ways.