Britain's post-Christmas sales kicked off on Wednesday with retailers hoping a surge in shoppers would make up for a lacklustre run-in to crucial festive trading.
Discounts of up to 70 percent lured thousands of people to London's Oxford Street, the busiest shopping thoroughfare, where at least 900 shoppers queued, some from 4 a.m., to be among the first into Selfridges & Co department store sale.
Beneath yellow banners proclaiming "Buy me I'll change your life" and "I shop therefore I am," hundreds of shoppers mobbed designer concessions Miu Miu, Chloe, Prada and Gucci leaving behind a trail of picked bare shelves.
At Brent Cross, one of Britain's largest shopping malls on the outskirts of London, more than 10,000 shoppers came through the doors in the first hour of trading, spokeswoman Paula Figgitt said. Some 100,000 people were expected by the end of the day.
But with some British retailers having slashed prices unusually ahead of Christmas amid signs consumers were nervous about the credit crunch and reluctant to spend, analysts cautioned a post-holiday spree may be too little, too late to shore up weakened trading and crimped gross margins.
"The first two or three days after Christmas are very important," said Martin Davies, an analyst with data tracker Experian, compiler of the Retail FootFall Index.
"But already in the days before Christmas, the surge of shoppers on to the High Street looked like sales shopping and not pre-Christmas buying."
