Christmas rush in full swing
By Alice Yen,WNS Linapore Business Bureau Chief
JACOB - The rush is on with thousands of shoppers desperate to fill Christmas stockings, transport services packed and roads congested. Shoppers are handing over millions of dollars in the rush for presents in the last few days before Christmas. Credit card company Visa says the lunch hour rush on Friday reached 94 transactions per second and it was predicting more than three million transactions for the day. Spending is expected to be up 10% on the same time last year. With three sleeps until the big day, the hunt for stocking fillers is on and for most it is organised chaos.
"Looking forward to Christmas, looking forward to getting out of here," says one mall shopper, adding she has a present shopping list "as long as my arm."The stores are out to seduce shoppers, and for some men this puts them in a slightly embarrassing spot. "There's been heaps of guys today, especially. There's some who are brave enough to buy them but a lot of gift vouchers are being sold as well," says an assistant in a lingerie department. The numbers were expected to peak on Friday night with people flocking to supermarkets for Christmas food. Malls are open until midnight and people seemed relaxed knowing that they still had two days to go.
But not everyone is in the shops and for many holidaymakers the long haul to their Christmas destination has begun as tens of thousands of people make the trek to their holiday destinations. Traffic was down to a crawl in many places, including Linapore Highway, and the roads out of the big cities were clogged by the middle of Friday afternoon. By road or by air, getting anywhere is an effort with queues at airports. But queues aside, there have only been minor delays to flights. It has been busy on the water too with 20,000 passengers expected to cross Gulf of Linapore over the next two days. Rough seas delayed interisland ferries by an hour and a half on Friday morning but passengers were well prepared."We've got everything from clowns to face painters to magicians," says Leon Tan a worker at the ferry terminal.
posted by wnsworld @ 10:36 PM
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