Boxing Day can be a chaotic day for shoppers, but it’s also an opportunity for well-known retailers to make big bucks.
However, one local business in downtown Lethbridge says they’re experiencing quite the opposite and are even opting to stay closed, due to the lack of sales they’re able to make on Boxing Day.
Brave customers ventured out Thursday on what’s known as the biggest shopping day of the year.
“It’s crazier than I’ve ever seen it here and the staff are running around, but they’ve been really good,” said Blaine Hogg, one of the many shoppers out on Boxing Day.
“They’ll stop and answer a question, then they take off to help somebody else. So that was also part of the fun — I wanted to see the mob.”
Despite the rise of other popular shopping days, such as Black Friday, Best Buy says Boxing Day is still their biggest day for sales.
Through the frenzy of trying to find the best deals, customers — or at least Canadian ones — haven’t forgotten their manners, one Best Buy employee says.
“Nobody’s getting arguing, we had a lot of products for door-crashers,” said Dakota Postman.
“Everyone was polite, getting in line and getting the products they wanted, which was really good.”
However, not all businesses are raking in big post-Christmas profits.
Big John’s Bookstore, a local business in downtown Lethbridge, says they stayed closed on Boxing Day because it’s not even worth staying open.
When they have stayed open in the past, they say, they were unable to make enough to even cover operating costs for the day.
Offering discounts to potential shoppers, the store’s owner says, didn’t help.
“One of the biggest problems that I have is that if I open up on those days, I will actually get two or three people,” said John Pyska.
Pyska is the head organizer of a local business group in Lethbridge called Santa’s Circle, which tries to draw more customers to local businesses in the downtown area through incentives like discounts.
With the holidays winding down, Pyska says the group will still carry on with their local initiative, just under a different name.
“We’re going to change the Facebook name and we’re going to try to build it up from there as a local collective business page where we’re trying to get everyone in the local area to see what other people are doing,” Pyska said.
“So other businesses can use it to…shop local, essentially.”
Pyska says the local business group has some plans in the works for the upcoming months, which they hope will draw in ‘more’ customers to Lethbridge’s downtown core, year round.
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