Retailers Opening at 5 a.m. Boxing Day

It is now 5:09 a.m. Boxing Day 2010. When I started keying this posting the sun was just starting to light the sky with that very soft early morning misty light that just manages to bend itself around the rising horizon.

I could not sleep. We are experiencing very high winds here in Perth. They have been gusting all night. I don’t mind rain, hail, thunder, and lightening, but I hate high winds. I keep waiting for the roof to peel off my house. My son, who did not come home from where-ever it was that he has been until about 4:30 a.m., tells me that there are tree branches down on the roads all over the place.

Anyway, so I arced up my computer and started browsing my usual sites, and the first one I looked at was www.news.com.au. And I find there that retailers are opening at 5:00 a.m. this Boxing Day morning!

Now I know that retailers are having a really hard time this Christmas because people are just not buying stuff, but I don’t really see how opening at 5 a.m. is going to help this. To start with, who even knows? Of all the people who might be going out to buy up some stuff today, who knows that retailers are opening so early. It was not advertised on the TV last night and we were watching TV until midnight at my house. There was nothing that I noticed in yesterday’s paper about it, although I will admit that my reading of yesterday’s paper was rushed and I only did a skim over—but I think I would have picked up something like that if my eye landed on it.

Also, if people were not buying before Christmas, when, one would think it was the logical time to do the bulk of any buying that needs to be done (otherwise how do you give the stuff you bought as Christmas presents?), then what makes the retailers think that they are going to sell so much more after Christmas?

Well it seems for anyone who does venture out to do some shopping this Boxing Day that you might get as much as 70 percent discount. And I must comment that it is good to see that the author of this item in the news.com.au article did not use a percent sign (%) but used the word(s) percent, as is the correct way when used in a non-technical way in a sentence. Well done. Great to see.

I will leave this very early morning ramble by posting the picture they had in the article of Melissa George, who is apparently going to open Myers in Sydney at 5:00 a.m. this morning—which she would have done about 3.5 hours ago now as Sydney is 3 hours ahead of Perth and it is 5:37 as I prepare to post this up to my site.

[Ctrl+Click on Melissa to open the actual article at news.com.au in a new Tab]