Debenhams confirms pre-Christmas Spectacular
Debenhams has confirmed it will launch its pre-Christmas Spectacular on Wednesday, promising more price cuts than the same Sale last year.
The department store will deliver £250m worth of price cuts, and will slash prices for four days from Wednesday, as revealed by Retail Week last week.
Debenhams, which factors in promotions as part of its annual budget, will cut prices on tens of thousands of items across all categories in its 150 stores and online, six weeks before Christmas.
Debenhams is the first high street retailer to launch a blanket promotion in the run-up to Christmas, and has fired the starter gun in the race to get customers shopping in the festive build up.
On the equivalent day last year, Debenhams launched a similar Spectacular which offered £200m of price-cuts and lasted for three days before being extended to cover the whole of the following weekend.
Marks & Spencer followed suit with a 20%-off promotion the following day, however, this year, M&S chairman Sir Stuart Rose vowed to remain full-price in the run up to Christmas.
Last year, retailers embarked on a discounting war on the back of a fall in consumer spend in the wake of the financial crisis.
Debenhams deputy chief executive Michael Sharp said: “Customers everywhere continue to feel the pinch in this recession. In fact many feel that there still is no light at the end of the tunnel. They want us to reduce prices now, so that’s what our Christmas Spectacular will do.
“With VAT set to increase in the New Year we really are offering January Sale value at a time when shoppers want it most,” added Sharp.
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Ian Middleton | 16-Nov-2009 12:55 pm
If Debs "factors in promotions as part of its annual budget", they are hardly price cuts are they? They sound more like planned reductions on prices they never intended to hold in the first place. So that's just cynically hoodwinking your customers isn't it? At the very least its telling them that its better not to buy from Debs at any time other than when these 'factored in' price changes are activated.
If that’s the case its a little rich to be claiming you are doing your customers a favour now. January sales used to be there to shift overbought stock, the rationale being that you couldn't factor in what you would be selling off until Christmas was over. If Debs can do it in December when one imagines they are looking at rapidly diminishing inventory anyway, a time when most stores would be worried that they didn’t have enough stock, why can't they do it all year round?
These promotions are just solutions to a problem that didn’t exist before the pre-Christmas sale was invented. How much further will this go I wonder. January sales in August? Christmas spectaculars in July? Maybe eventually we’ll come full circle and be running the 2011 January sales in January 2010. At least that would make more sense than these self defeating strategies to incentivise customers that were already eager enough at this time of the year before all this madness started.
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