RISING LIVING COSTS WEAKEN CONSUMER SENTIMENT DURING BLACK FRIDAY The anticipated UK spend for 2023 would be £5.6 bn
Rising living costs pushed up by higher interest rates are weakening Britain’s consumer sentiment during the traditional year-end shopping season this year, said Jasmine Birtles, a British consumer industry expert, on Friday.
The decision made by the Bank of England, the central bank of Britain, to raise interest rates to a decade-high to curb the persistently high inflation has resulted in suppressed economic activities.
British consumers are now less willing to spend even when retailers have stepped up their promotional efforts such as increasing discounts and providing free delivery service.
Black Friday is one of the year-end shopping seasons critical to Britain’s retail industry and even the country’s economy. The British government has turned its focus from curbing inflation to tax cuts, hoping to shore up the country’s flat GDP growth.
A report released by PricewaterhouseCoopers on Nov. 16 predicted that sales during this year’s Black Friday would be lower than the previous years in Britain.
The report predicted that during this year’s Black Friday, the anticipated Britain spending for 2023 would be £5.6 bn (7.06 billion U.S. dollars), a noticeable drop from the £7.1 bn (8.95 billion U.S. dollars) forecast in 2022.
It also showed that British consumers’ interest in Black Friday has dropped from 61% in 2022 to 44% in 2023, the lowest seen for a number of years except for 2020 when the lockdown was still in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic.