UK Xmas spend hits £222k a minute on busiest day ever

With the last of the year's wage packets safely deposited and the kids/significant others off to school and work respectively, Monday 3rd December will be a bumper, bonanza day for online stores across the UK with spending projected to pass £222,222 a minute at some point today. KitGuru munches a mince pie and dusts off the abacus.

While the overall economy might still be a little gloomy, the people over at Visa credit cards are predicting that today will beat last year by more than 20% in terms of overall spending power. That's £320m in a single day, which is not bad going.

With the average spend hovering around the £45 mark, you can do a quick calculation and see that Visa is estimating close to 7 million transactions will pass through those little card readers on Monday 3rd December 2012. Nice.

“On Mega Monday, people across the UK will go online”, said Visa Europe commercial director Dr Steve Perry. While Amazon label the same day ‘Cyber Monday' and expect traffic to peak through their virtual tills just after 9pm.

Those little Amazon packets are actually distributed from 8 main shipping centres across the UK and, for this season's peak, Amazon has hired in more than 9,000 additional staff.

How does MEGA/CYBER Monday compare to a regular day?  Well for high street stores like Marks & Spencer, sales online today will triple the yearly average. Not bad going in a double dip, but the actual in-store peak will happen during the ‘Sorry, Amazon cannot deliver, you will need to use a real shop – remember those – they are near the station in the high street' panic, which sets in on the 22nd and 23rd of the month.

KitGuru says: We can't understand why the UK retail sector persists in telling these lies and avoiding acceptance that the real work (and, therefore, revenue) is actually generated by an army of elves working furiously in underground bunkers near the north pole. No?  Well, we're sure it's somewhere in the world that the small people are working very hard.

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