29 March 2024, 11:33
By Furniture News Nov 30, 2016

Footfall levels fall during Black Friday

As predicted, UK retail footfall fell on Black Friday as shoppers shelved the high street and turned to online sales.

The UK Retail Traffic Index, published by Ipsos Retail Performance, saw footfall drop by 0.7% on last year. However Black Friday still delivered a considerable boost to footfall levels, which were 62% higher than the previous Friday.

The one sector to buck the trend and witness higher footfall levels than last year was clothing and footwear, where traffic was up 5.0%. The sector suffering the worst decline against last year was Jewellery and Accessories, despite the stores enjoying double the footfall of the previous Friday.

Ipsos Retail Performance, the global retail and footfall consultant, compiled the footfall figures for Friday 25th November, by monitoring the number of individual shoppers entering over 4,000 non-food retail stores across the UK.

Dr Tim Denison, director of retail at Ipsos Retail Performance, says: “The evidence suggests that Black Friday has peaked in the UK as a one day in-store event in the retail calendar, but continues to gather momentum on-line. By turning it into a multi-day promotion, retailers have successfully suppressed the storming of stores, website crashes and delivery hiatus that proved so damaging over the last couple of years.

We await with interest to see how well footfall is sustained over the duration of the longer campaigns and how it impacts demand in the run up to Christmas.”

Around the regions, stores in North East England saw the largest drop in footfall levels against last year, at -8.1%, far greater than all other regions. In contrast, both Wales and London benefited from larger number of shoppers this year than last.

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