I am going to offer my loyal reader some useful advice. Do not go shopping this Friday. In fact, don’t even go out this Friday, just in case you get caught up in the chaos. Because Friday 23 December is going to be – and this is official – “Frenzied Friday”. Ten million people are going to be out there, emptying the supermarkets of pretty well everything, on what will be the busiest food shopping day of the year. You can understand this panic, of course, because the shops will be closed on Sunday. How on earth will folk manage?
The Centre for Retail Research (well, there had to be one, didn’t there?) estimates that we will spend £894 million next Friday on food, booze and presents. Not only that, us Brits will be spending something like 25% of total expenditure across the whole of Europe, with every family spending an astounding £800 on Christmas shopping. This sounds completely mad to me.
I know that from our point of view, we will buy things we never buy during the rest of the year, like cheese, spirits and nuts, and it feels that sometimes we might have overdone things. But we don’t throw much away. I am not sure this is true for everyone. Christmas is also a special time for food waste, something we are very good at in Britain.
I have long argued, with limited success, I have to admit, that there is no need to carry out an industrial sized shop in the remaining days before Christmas. We have these handy things called fridges and freezers these days. All we need to do is to buy sufficient food for The Big Day itself and if we run out of marshmallows and cherry brandy, we can always return to the supermarket on Boxing Day. My words I am afraid will have little meaning by Friday of next week.
