Shoppers have started Christmas shopping early this year as sales at clothes stores came close to pre-pandemic levels, with Black Friday purchases set to bring in a £9billion windfall.
The rush to get presents sorted in plenty of time helped push overall sales volumes up in October by 0.8 per cent – ending a five-month run of falling or flat volumes, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
It was also above the figure in a Reuters poll of