South Yorkshire gears up for Black Friday

As Black Friday gets underway, it's thought more people in South Yorkshire will be looking online for deals rather than in the shops

Author: Ben BasonPublished 24th Nov 2017

As shops across South Yorkshire prepare for the Black Friday rush, we're hearing more people than ever will be heading online to get their Christmas bargains instead.

Experts reckon Black Friday's moving increasingly online - with only a 4% increase in high street sales expected this year.

On our Twitter poll, 20% of you said you'd be going online for deals and just 2% said in the shops.

But John Magee, from Lakeside Village in Doncaster, says not everyone's using the internet - they're execting more than 21,000 customers this weekend:

"It's changed the way that people do their shopping and I think a lot of people now use a mixture of shopping in physical shopping centres like ours and also shopping online. Lots of the opportunity for bricks and mortar shopping centres is in click and collect and Amazon lockers and all those kinds of things.

"We've seen increases over the Black Friday period every year and we're expecting that to continue - it's the first day that lots of the stores will have the real bargains on offer as we go into Christmas - lots of the key Christmas gifts will be heavily reduced from today.

"We're expecting even more people than last year this week. Especially on Sunday because we've got the Coco-Cola truck here so we're execting Sunday to be particularly busy."

Britons are expected to spend £2.6 billion today alone - but experts think past scenes of in-store brawls over cut-price televisions are unlikely to be repeated