You know those people who argue about the date all the time? Yes you do, think about it. First there are those who said that the Millennium* should have actually been celebrated in 2001 not 2000, and then there are the people who go on and on about us getting the date of Christ’s birth wrong so really the Millennium should have been in 1983, or whenever. Or maybe, it should have been this year… Because whatever you think of these date obsessed people it’d be hard not to argue that the current financial climate seems very millennial, that there’s a certain waft of the fin de siècle in the air.

Stores all over the country are offering up to 70% off their merchandise. Some a little more, some a little less. And it seems like it is having an effect on people, with footfall up on last year. That the people are only spending because of the size of this reduction, and the affect on profits of said stores has been left mainly unsaid up to now.

Sales are interesting phenomena, affecting different people in different ways. My parents are classic examples of people easily taken in by that big red money off sticker, taking any opportunity they can to stock up on homeware if it is reduced. And to be fair I often took advantage of this myself when growing up, trotting over to them in department stores with items of clothing I fancied that had been reduced. “Well, it is such a good deal,” my Dad would say, and that would be that.

When I worked i marketing, I remember one of the senior people in the office taking a call with someone from a bank within earshot. The person on the other end of the line was trying to ask for a discount on a marketing contract that was under consideration, and the man in the office was saying that it wasn’t possible because they had already offered a tightly costed deal. He attempted to explain what the money was needed for, how it would be spent. It would have been easy for him, and many negotiators would have, to knock off a little bit of money to make some kind of gesture. But he would not budge. When he hung up the phone he said, “Well you can’t suddenly drop the price on their whim because it makes you seem like cheats.”

He had a point, and perhaps for the sake of the economy it is to be hoped that consumers don’t feel the same way about suddenly being faced with the same stock they shunned before Christmas with fifty percent slashed off the price. Fifty percent. Should consumers not be outraged by that as opposed to giddy with excitement? The ease at which stores can slash prices just shows how much they had been overcharging in the first place. Unless, of course, they really are that desperate. I am not sure which scenario is better.

In either case this new found love of shopping is bound to subside. When the sales are over, will customers ever trust stores again, or will they learn from this experience and wait until the sales start over. So much of business and consumerism is down to confidence and at present that confidence is at least 70% off. Whether it recovers in this generation is a serious question facing us all.

* Look closely and you, like I, might just notice that Millennium is double l and double n. It looks wrong to me, but its correct, my dictionary tole me. The reason is the root from two double lettered Latin words: mille meaning thousand and annum meaning year.