Opinion: Closing on Boxing Day is about having heart

The arguments for and against trading on Boxing Day are of the classic ‘hearts and minds’ variety.

Your heart says ‘close the stores’ while your head says ‘but it’s the biggest day of the year!’

Normally the head prevails.

But let’s just stop and think about this.

If we all decided to close on Boxing Day, it would surely be a zero-sum market share game?

We can only sell what we have to sell once.

Isn’t there still enough time to sell it if we started the Sale on December 27?

If your product offers quality, innovation, newness and is differentiated enough, customers will be happy to wait to shop your store on 27th December.

If not, they can always shop online.

And maybe some customers would also thank us for not bombarding them with shopping pressure on Boxing Day, as they have families too.

The results of Fat Face’s trial

This year Fat Face decided to trial closing 10 stores on Boxing Day and it has turned out to be a very interesting exercise.

The announcement had the biggest positive reaction of any topic last year from our customers on Facebook.

At the FatFace Peak Conference in September, the concept received an overwhelming spontaneous cheer from retail managers.

“We are currently measuring the impact on sales, profit and the sell-through of Sale goods in the ten locations and will report back soon”

And in smaller market towns, we had local traders thank us for the decision and for supporting the local community.

The ‘heart’ arguments definitely won the first battle!

But what about winning the ‘minds’ as well? We will know soon enough.

We are currently measuring the impact on sales, profit and the sell-through of Sale goods in the ten locations and will report back soon.

I visited four of our stores that were trading on Boxing Day and my instincts tell me that the decision to close is a lot easier to take in smaller market towns than larger cities and shopping centres.

Even so, I expect to expand this trial next year and close up to 50 stores on Boxing Day next year.

That’s my heart talking again, but let’s see when the final results are in.

Be brave

The truth is that I think the balance of the ‘hearts and minds’ argument on whether to close stores on Boxing Day will always be hard to weigh up because the reality is that you can’t control what your competitors do. 

Mr Lapworth from Kettering initiated the petition to Government to ban shops opening on Boxing Day with the following challenge: ‘Forget making money for one day, let’s concentrate on making more memories with the ones we love’.

In my experience, the boardroom is nearly always split on this issue. The chief executive may just have to call it.

Go on, be brave. Have a bigger heart next Christmas. I dare you.