Child Of The 1980's

When I was a kid we never really bothered with the Christmas Sales until it was too late and all the bargains had already been snapped up. The main reason for this was that we used to spend most of Christmas week visiting or being visited by various relatives, so we never had the time. When I got a bit older the visiting of relatives begain to stop happening so much, so we might pop down the shops to see if we could get something with any Christmas money we had been given. Normally we came back with the money still in our pocket…

There was one particular shop in the town where I live that did have some good bargains though. This was the local independant department store, a bit like one of the John Lewis stores but on a bit smaller scale. They would always have some great bargains on some of the more expensive items they sold, such as furniture, and because of this people would actually camp out in the shop entrance and along the street on Christmas Day and Boxing Day (in those days Boxing Day was still a non-shopping day, not like it is today) waiting for the shop to open so they could run and claim the bargain they had their eye on. The sale items were usually advertised in the window, so people had a good idea of what they wanted to get. One year the queue was so long it even made it onto the local television news!

The other thing I liked about the Christmas sales were the TV adverts advertising them. Normally these were national department stores and furniture stores. The one that made me laugh the most was the one for Courts, the furniture store that is no longer trading in the UK, although they do still have a presence in other countries. Courts always seemed to have a sale on all year round, so when their advert came on you always thought it was only about a week since the last one. Courts always seemed to have an advert some time in January saying “Sale must end soon” which was even funnier.

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This entry is filed under Memories and was posted on December 26th, 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.