A happy Xmas for retail

Black Fri­day has now been held in Cat­alo­nia for the past three years. The first was barely no­ticed, the pop­u­lar­ity of the sec­ond sig­naled its true ar­rival, and the third last week was mad­ness. The suc­cess of the day of sales marked the start­ing point of the Christ­mas shop­ping pe­riod, which the Barcelona re­tail sec­tor trusts will be one of the best since the eco­nomic cri­sis began. The feel­ing in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal is shared on a na­tional level, as the re­tail­ers' or­gan­i­sa­tion, the Con­fed­eració de Comerç de Catalunya, es­ti­mates sales will be up to 4% higher than last year.

Today is the first of three Sun­days in De­cem­ber in which shops in Barcelona, and else­where, will be open, as they will on the De­cem­ber 8 bank hol­i­day. That means 32 con­tin­u­ous days (from Nov 23 to Dec 24) in which shops will be open, un­like last year when the Cata­lan cap­i­tal alone opened its shops for only one Sun­day in De­cem­ber.

The city coun­cil was forced to admit its error, and this year de­cided to add No­vem­ber 29 and De­cem­ber 13 to the other three extra shop­ping days des­ig­nated by the Gen­er­al­i­tat on the Sun­days of De­cem­ber 6 and 20, and the De­cem­ber 8 pub­lic hol­i­day. So far, the first of these extra shop­ping days, on No­vem­ber 29, is con­sid­ered a suc­cess.

How­ever, this is not the only rea­son for re­tail­ers' op­ti­mism. The cam­paign, Avui comença Nadal, by the Fun­dació Barcelona Comerç, rep­re­sent­ing 18 shop­ping areas, was held at the end of No­vem­ber with sales and dis­count vouch­ers that can be ex­changed be­tween De­cem­ber 1 and 24. The cam­paign also turned out “very well”, ac­cord­ing to the foun­da­tion's pres­i­dent, Vicenç Gasca, who points out that the re­ports drawn up by Esade for the foun­da­tion also de­tect an up­ward trend in the past few months.

The other large re­tail as­so­ci­a­tion, Barcelona Oberta (BO), rep­re­sent­ing the city's cen­tral and tourist shop­ping areas, shares the op­ti­mism: “The trend is pos­i­tive and, more­over, we have had a warm No­vem­ber, which means a lot of win­ter cloth­ing stock has built up and that also has a pos­i­tive ef­fect [on Christ­mas sales],” says BO pres­i­dent, Gabriel Jené.