Vancouverites are poised to do more shopping on Black Friday than ever before, according to a report that Deloitte released November 3.
The consulting firm’s 2014 Holiday Retail Outlook revealed that 57.8% of Vancouverites surveyed said they plan to do most holiday shopping before December. That’s up from 47.7% last year.
“We’ve asked this question for a number of years and noticed that holiday shopping has been gradually shifting toward November,” said Rick Kohn, who is a Deloitte partner and leader of its B.C. retail practice.
“It would be safe to say that the numbers we’re seeing, for having a majority of shopping done before December, are higher than they’ve ever been.”
Kohn told Business in Vancouver that rising consumer awareness of Black Friday in Canada and retailers’ response to it, by offering sales, is largely responsible for the trend.
Indeed retailers, such as Boys’ Co. owner David Goldman, told BIV that they are planning huge sales on Black Friday to attract business.
“It has been a hugely important day for us in the past two to three years,” he said. “It didn’t used to be like that. Now, it seems to me that a lot of shopping centre managers are noticing this too and they’re marketing their malls for Black Friday.”
Deloitte’s survey of 2,019 Canadians found that 12.3% of Vancouver residents said they plan to spend more on gifts, entertainment and donations this year, compared with last year. Respondents outside of Vancouver were less keen to be spendthrift.
Only 8.4% of Canadians who live outside Vancouver said that they planned to spend more this holiday season on those items.
Another trend that Kohn had noticed is that Canadians are increasingly shopping at home instead of crossing the U.S. border.
“We’ve noticed over the past number of years that the number of people who say they will cross-border shop has been falling,” he said.
“This year the number fell a bit more compared to the past. It’s reached a level that is probably stable and indicative of the days before the dollar was strong.”
The Canadian dollar in October hit a five-year low against the U.S. greenback. The lure for cross-border shoppers of buying cheap gasoline in the U.S. has also become less of an incentive with gasoline prices falling on both sides of the border, meaning a smaller net gain for filling up in the U.S.
