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Despite Black Friday’s popularity, Boxing Day is not going anywhere
By Jerrison Oracion, Senior Columnist
Boxing Day has been a popular tradition in the past few decades. It’s the day after Christmas where everyone lines up in front of a store and waits until they can go inside to get deals on popular and normally expensive items—mainly electronics. Despite Boxing Day and Black Friday having a lot of similarities, they are some differences between the two shopping holidays. Boxing Day is the Canadian equivalent of Black Friday, in terms of shopping holidays. They are relatively the same in terms of sales and advertisements except on Boxing Day you do not have everyone running inside the store and fighting crowds to get good deals.
Since the beginning of online shopping with Amazon and Black Friday coming to Canada, the lineups on Boxing Day have started to get smaller. Many people have thought that this would be the end of the Canadian shopping holiday, with Black Friday or online shopping taking its place. However, online shopping does not have the same experience as physically going into a store. Also, a lot of people continue to go to stores and malls to get items on sale, showing that Boxing Day is still a popular shopping holiday, and will still be be around in the distant future.
Over the past few years when I go to stores on Boxing Day, I usually wait outside the store for at least an hour and the lineup is so long that it goes all the way to the back of the store. Recently, I’ve noticed that many stores are less busy because they do not have a lot of deals to offer, and many people are purchasing things online instead.
However, many malls including Metrotown and Eaton Centre in Toronto were very busy because people love good deals and they like to see the product before they buy it; something you can’t do with online shopping. Furthermore, when I looked on Amazon to see what sales they had on Boxing Day, I didn’t see anything interesting.
The disadvantages of getting deals online are that you might have to wait for a few weeks for the items to be shipped, or the item that you want might be sold out in a few seconds. Compared to going to the store on Boxing Day where you can get the item immediately and they have a stock of their products so that by lining up early, you have an increased chance of getting your product at a reduced cost.
Fewer sales happen on Boxing Day because of Black Friday coming to Canada years ago, but it is still a popular day to shop. The disadvantages of online shopping led to more people to shop in stores on Boxing Day and because of this, Boxing Day will continue as a tradition for generations to come.
