Black Friday/Cyber Monday, pensions, rail fares and PPI

Don’t believe the hype. Despite forecasts of record sales for this year’s shopping frenzy, Black Friday appears to have been a bit of damp squib, with online sales growth falling significantly short of predictions. The Times reports that purchasing online was up by only 6.7 per cent against the same day the previous year, compared with forecasts of a 25 per cent leap. This is according to PCA Predict, which tracks online transactions for retailers. Balancing the slowdown in online sales growth was a 2 per cent annual rise in shoppers across high streets, retail parks and shopping centres in the UK, figures from Springboard suggested. However, The Telegraph reports that ‘British shoppers are expected to increase spending by a fifth to £1.9 billion today’, the so-called ‘Cyber Monday’. The paper also says that ‘over the entire weekend, UK consumers are expected to spend £5.76 billion, an increase of 15 per cent on last year’.