Boxing Day Shopping in Canada
Well yesterday was Boxing Day up here in the chilly north and what most Canadians do is go shopping! Bargain shopping is what Boxing Day is all about up here. Retail stores usually have limited amount of stock on crazy priced products which drive the customers to their doors early in the morning. How early? Well people are known to line up outside big-box stores such as Futureshop, A&B Sound, BestBuy usually around midnight (Christmas).
I went to Coquitlam Centre hoping to find myself a nicely priced LCD monitor. Unfortunately the only place that has LCDs for sale at a reasonable price would be Futureshop. Well I get there and people are being herded around the store by massive lines. It was shoulder-to-shoulder customers which seemed to outweigh the employees 10 to 1 easily.
I never did get my LCD, they were out of stock, in fact they were out of stock of pretty much everything. My Dad was looking for a 50” LG Plasma screen and they were out of stock of that even though 3 employees told him they had stock. We waited in a line up for 40+ minutes to find out the employees were wrong and they had none of them, nor did their Burnaby warehouse.
The rest of the mall was nuts, line ups everywhere and retailers only allowing a limited number of people into their stores. Which would make sense since the mass of people could easily steal things.
Does Boxing Day really hold any good deals? Sometimes they do, most of the electronic stores sell crap at cheap prices to bring customers into their stores. They also have a very limited number of the products to begin with which frustrates customers to no end. It seems more and more retailers are having Boxing Week Sales but again, they usually only keep limited stock and the new stock usually doesn’t arrive until the end of the sale.
Anyway my experience at a Boxing Day rush at a mall was again horrible. I dislike crowded malls and I really dislike it when I do not get what I am looking for. I’ll check later in the week to see if the LCD stock was replenished but I doubt they will get any more in.
Do you have any nightmarish type Boxing Day experiences and care to comment on it? I’d love to hear about how other people’s Boxing Day shopping went.
I don’t find any great deals on Boxing day at the big box stores. There are some deals here and there, but its not worth it to me to get up early and goto the crowded mall.
I did my shopping on Dec 24th, at http://www.ncix.com (Located in Burnaby near Metrotown). I picked up a Powerball, a 1GB camera card for a friend, and a cheap mouse for my sisters laptop.
I just love to go for shopping and also i have some good stuffs about the boxing game. . but usually they are expensive isn’t it???
I’ve spent it the shopping way before, (in Canada), and one year in England I tried to show my relatives how to do boxing day shopping – only half the stores were open and we had to try again the next day. This year I spent it with my fiance, we’d spent christmas apart, and this was our christmas day. My favourite boxing day since childhood – when we used to spend it at the zoo!