High Street stores facing a Christmas threat from the Internet
They have done it in Coleford in Gloucestershire and north of the border in Aberdeen. Eton (the town not the school ) is also on the list.
I half expected them to have done it in the West End of London when I was there on Wednesday night.
Put the Christmas lights up, that is.
In fact, the festive frenzy is gearing up a full ten weeks in advance this year.
So what is driving this ghastly display of zeal? Are shopkeepers so scared that the growing economic doom will wipe out the Christmas sales bonanza that they are trying to whip up a grotesquely premature shopping spree?
Actually, no. It seems that the Christmas lights contractors are keen to get the job out of the way in many places. Before it gets dark, presumably. How unutterably depressing.
However, it seems as if a spending strike is the least of retailers’ worries.
A new threat faces them. As we report today, credit crunches, recessions, repossessions and redundancies notwithstanding, some 60 per cent of consumers say they have no plans to cut back on their Christmas spending.
It’s just that they’ll be spending in different ways – mainly via the internet.
Kelkoo, a shopping comparison website, says that 78 per cent of those it questioned as part of a Christmas shopping survey are opting to save time and money by buying on line.
But this exercise has the ring of truth. You only have to look at the success of Amazon and eBay to see just how much retail habits are changing.
This writer (a technophobe, if his colleagues are to be believed) has transferred much of compulsive book-buying to the internet. So why not go a step further and look after Christmas online as well? Anything to avoid the ersatz jolliness of a season rendered meaningless by crass commercialism.
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