Savvy Spending

Profile of the nation

Profile of the Nation

Here’s what we hope you’ll agree is some insightful information into how we Brits do our favourite pastime – shop!

Content

  • First of all let’s take a quick look at our Christmas shopping habits last year, where more people bought online than ever before.


    (The Guardian, 2006: the year of the online Christmas, January 3, 2007)
    • John Lewis saw its online sales soar 60% in December. Tesco.com broke all records with 1.3m shoppers buying food and presents on the site in the four weeks before Christmas - up 30% on 2005.
    • Amazon.com had its best holiday season, with more than 4m items worldwide ordered on December 11 - a record for a single day.
    • The IMRG said overall online shopping now represented 10% of total retail sales in the UK, compared with just 0.5% in 2000. In 2006 as a whole, online sales were up 40% from the previous year.

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  • Believe it or not- people over the age of 55 years (often referred to as ‘Silver Surfers’) are increasingly spending more and more time and money on the internet
    (Silver surfers prefer the internet to DIY and gardening, AXA.co.uk, 2007)

    The AXA report, which looked at the online habits of (retired people) ‘Silver surfers’ in 11 countries, the US, Canada, Australia and the UK found that silver surfers are using the internet for more than six hours a week.

    In the survey, 41% of pensioners listed browsing the internet as their preferred pastime, ahead of gardening and DIY.


    Other findings were:

    • Four in ten retired people are regular e-shoppers, with travel tickets being their most popular item, as 45% regularly booking online.
    • 84% use the internet for keeping in touch with friends and relatives via email. The next most popular online activity was 'looking for information', selected by 83%
    • 35% go online for banking activities.

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  • The Internet is clearly becoming integral to our lives, let’s see how many of us have chosen to jump on board and get it connected up in our homes.
    (Three out of five aint bad, Web20.telecomtv.com, 07.09.2007)
    • Three out of five homes in the UK now have Internet access, according to National Statistics. The new survey of 1,800 adults in Great Britain and Northern Ireland found that 5.2 million households (61 per cent) now have Internet access, up by almost one million (54 per cent) from 2006.
    • The regions with the highest level of access were London and the South West; both with 69 per cent, while the areas with the lowest access levels were Yorkshire and the Humber, the North East and Northern Ireland, each with 52 per cent.

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  • So what is it that is getting us to shop more online than offline?... Queues! We Brits will do anything to avoid a queue.
    (Intolerance to queues changing UK shopping habits, www.visaeurope.com, 09.08.05)
    • People in the UK are changing the way they shop, just so they don't have to stand in a queue, according to research from Visa UK.
    • With 24/7 and always-on lifestyles becoming more common, research from Visa's Understanding Everyday campaign revealed that over half of adults in the UK are more impatient now than they have ever been before. This intolerance is having a marked affect on shopping routines, as the busy weekly shop and the queues that go with them are ditched in favour of other options.
    • 76% of people are taking advantage of late night and 24-hour openings at supermarkets to do their grocery shopping and another 43% are using self-service checkouts to speed up the process. Nearly two thirds of people make the most of their local shops because of the shorter queues, while 37% are avoiding shops altogether by doing all their shopping online.

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  • Or more to the point are we just getting lazy? How far would we travel to save money?
    Brits Don't Go the Distance for a Bargain, according to PriceRunner.co.uk
    • Bone idle Brits are wasting £88.4 million a year by not venturing out onto the streets to bag a bargain. One in five Britons will not get out of bed to save a tenner on a purchase and one in ten would rather stay on the sofa than bank £50.
    • The research also reveals that one in ten people won't even bother to travel more than five miles for a massive saving of £500.
    • The study in October 2006 examined the shopping habits of the nation and encouraging people to think more wisely about their spending.
    How far for a bargain?
    • Men are the more frugal sex
      Men are far more prepared than women to travel to save a bit of cash. Two thirds of men surveyed would travel more than two miles to save £10 compared to just over half of women. This trend extends to larger purchases too. Nearly six out of ten men are willing to go more than 75 miles to save £500 whereas just a third of women would make this kind of journey.


    • Londoners don't save their capital
      Londoners are the laziest shoppers in the UK, with nearly half refusing to travel further than a mile to save £10. Scotland is one of the thriftiest places, with more Scots (15%) willing to travel over 50 miles to make a saving of £50 than in any other area.


    • How far will your money take you?
      The results of the research revealed shoppers' "tipping points". These are the deal-clinching distances that the nation is willing to travel for a purchase:
      • To save £10, those surveyed said they would travel an average of 5.8 miles
      • Britons would travel an average 15.5 miles for a saving of £50
      • To save £100, Britons would travel 29 miles
      • For a huge saving of £500, the average distance people are happy to travel increases to 68.2 miles
      • The typical family car uses just 13 pence worth of petrol per mile and the average bus ticket costs just £1.50, meaning Brits are potentially losing a lot of cash unnecessarily.

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