Christmas food and drink spend to reach £5.3bn

The e-commerce business service said total retail spending was expected to reach £16bn – an increase of 2.7% from last year.

The average shopper would spend 10 hours on Christmas-related shopping and an average total of £433, the survey of 2,000 consumers revealed.

With warm weather to blame for a slow start to the winter for retailers, Christmas would be more important than ever to boost end of year numbers, Guy Chiswick, md of Webloyalty Northern Europe, said.

‘Big opportunity’​

“Our research shows that UK shoppers will spend more overall on Christmas this year than in 2013, with gift spend up 3.3% on last year’s figures,”​ he said.

“Interestingly, over a fifth of us intend to spend less this year, meaning a big opportunity for low-cost retailers to cash in this Christmas.”​

The traditional Christmas food shop remained a favourite for in-store shoppers, he added.

Almost two-thirds (66.5%) planned to do their food shopping in store with more than half (51.8%) of consumers planning to shop at either Aldi, Iceland, Lidl or Farmfoods.

More than a third (34%) will shop at Aldi or Lidl.

Despite a bad year, Tesco topped the supermarket chart as nearly 40% (37.9%) of Brits planned to use them for Christmas food and grocery shopping this year.

Just over a quarter (29.5%) said they would shop at ‘high-end supermarkets’ such as Marks & Spencer, Waitrose, and online supermarket Ocado.

A third of respondents said they would do their festive food shop solely online.

Of shoppers preferring to use online supermarkets, a third (33.5%) would do so because it worked out cheaper, Webloyalty claimed.

Saved time ​

Nearly two thirds (63.2%) agreed that online grocery shopping saved time compared to visiting supermarkets in store, it added.

One in 20 of those surveyed planned to spend more than 48 hours shopping for gifts, food and decorations this year.

Earlier this month, food safety firm Qadex warned food and drink manufacturers to beware of the threat at Christmas of food fraud​.

Cash conscious consumers could be tempted to break the law in the hunt for the best possible deals, Qadex claimed.