Boxing Day 2017 sales sees bargain hunters queue through the night ready to spend £4.5 BILLION on the busiest shopping day ever
BARGAIN hunters queued through the night for Boxing Day sales — with Next opening earliest at 6am.
Some 23 million people — almost one in two adults — are set to make today the biggest shopping day ever.
They are expected to blow a record £4.5billion, lured by price cuts of up to 90 per cent.
Across the country, hundreds of keen shoppers queued in miserable wet weather in the early hours of this morning.
Queues spanned two floors at Trinity shopping centre, Leeds, ahead of Next opening at 6am.
While there was a scramble in Selfridges on Oxford Street, London, where prices were slashed by 70 per cent.
The spree, dubbed The Big One by retail insiders, is predicted to thrash the £2.6billion spent on Black Friday and the £1.67billion on the last Saturday before Christmas.
Sales at most retailers began at 9am. But the fashion and homewear store Next and supermarket Sainsbury’s — at 8am — were early starters.
How to make sure you’re getting a real bargain in the Boxing Day sales
Security guards were on duty all night for queues, with in-store staff at work as early as 3am.
Analysts said many shoppers were focusing solely on Boxing Day and not other sales days for bumper price cuts.
The splurge comes after pre-Christmas shopper numbers were down 9.9 per cent.
Today 13.6million people will buy in stores and a further 9.2million will shop online, a study by the Centre for Retail Research found.
Its director Professor Joshua Bamfield said: “People are so desperate to get the best bargains they won’t wait until December 27.”
MOST READ IN MONEY
Websites are set for their first £1billion Boxing Day, according to online retail chiefs IMRG.
Currys was braced for up to 300,000 website visitors an hour.
Today’s in-store and online spending total will be a daily retail spending record — beating the £4.03billion of December 26 last year.