‘Super Saturday’ set to lure last-minute shoppers in US despite Omicron surge

NEW YORK/CHICAGO: US retailers opened their doors on Saturday to what they hope will be swarms of shoppers searching for last-minute holiday gifts, despite surging cases of the coronavirus, including the new, highly-contagious Omicron variant.

The last Saturday before Christmas - dubbed ‘Super Saturday’ - is typically one of the busiest shopping days of the year, marked by a rush to buy last-minutes gifts to tuck under the Christmas tree.

The risks to shoppers this year, however, are not just that merchandise might be out of stock, but also that in-person shopping could trigger more coronavirus infections - making Super Saturday a super-spreader event.

Toy store owner Katherine Nguyen says she anticipates more people to shop in person at her three Chicago-area locations compared to the last Saturday before Christmas 2020, or even the last Saturday before the pre-pandemic Christmas of 2019.

“It’s like the new variant is the new normal - the environment has gotten a little used to that,” she said.

Foot-traffic tracking firm Placer.ai said it expects more people to visit stores this weekend than on the same weekend last year. Sensormatic Solutions, a data firm that measures store visits, cited a nearly 48% increase in foot traffic on the Friday after Thanksgiving compared to a year earlier as a sign that people would want to shop in-person.

A supply chain logjam has left many people also feeling nervous about not getting merchandise ordered online in time for the Dec. 25 holiday. “Consumers have been bombarded with messages about the impact of supply shortages on the availability of holiday gifts,” said David Berson, chief economist at Nationwide in Columbus, Ohio.

Nguyen said her three stores never received shipments of merchandise for about 15% of their toy catalog. The toys, she says, are “sitting on a container in Long Beach, California, outside of the water waiting to come in.”