RETAILERS and department stores have reported their best sales figures of the year as festive shoppers rushed to the high street for some last-minute gifts.
With red-ticket price reductions in many stores, bargain hunters have waited until the final weekend before Christmas to finish their present buying.
Shoppers queued outside Braehead before it opened on Saturday and yesterday and were still there at midnight when it closed, said general manager Gary Turnbull.
"People are normally out with their friends in pubs and clubs we were very busy up to 10.30pm and then there were the really keen shoppers who were buying Christmas presents right up to when we closed at midnight.
It has been a record-breaking week at John Lewis, with sales 4% up on the previous year, according to Ken Miller, operations manager of the Glasgow store.
He said there had been a late surge in shoppers over the weekend.
"We've been exceptionally busy, we were well up on Saturday and are on course for another good day," he said yesterday. "The weather doesn't seem to have put people off."
The biggest sellers are iPads, with John Lewis selling one every 10 seconds across the UK.
Specifically in Glasgow, popular purchases have been on jewellery and haircare products such as straighteners and hairdryers.
This weekend Silverburn reported a 20% year-on-year rise in footfall.
Meanwhile, sales at Marks & Spencer leave food for thought. This year it expects to sell six million packs of party food over the festive season and 1.2 million individual Christmas puddings.
The high street store sells one in four turkeys bought in the UK over the Christmas period.
It is a change of pace on the nation's high streets after figures from the Scottish Retail Consortium revealed a 0.8% drop in like-on-like retail sales in November. Last month, Scotland saw the lowest growth in pre-Christmas shopping sales in eight years.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article