TWENTY-THREE shopping days to Christmas. If you enjoy shopping that is 23 days of thrills and excitement.

For some of us, the realistic figure is three weeks until one needs to go shopping. That’s how the stores are interpreting matters, as the usual yearon- year ever-increasing Christmas buying binge is in serious threat this year of not being the case.

This week has seen the introduction of VAT at 15 per cent, rather than at 17.5 per cent, and time will tell whether or not this will be enough of a stimulus to see shoppers part with ever more of their hard earned.

Competition on the high street, and indeed out of town, is now so fierce that many stores have announced Christmas sales in advance of Christmas. For years, the savvy shopper has foregone tradition, and saved the bulk of big ticket items until after Boxing Day.

The shops have cottoned onto this trend, and are responding accordingly.

Flat screen TVs are in demand this year, as they were last year. For those who held out on price grounds last year, this year’s prices are much more attractive.

IPods are set to sell like hot cakes, especially in view of the number of ipod doc related gadgets.

Many electrical items are cyclical. Who can remember the old cine cameras, filming onto tape, which then needed a projector to show the footage? Then came the camcorder, again using tape, but capable of being played with adaptation through a video player. Next came the capture of media onto DVD.

Even this is old hat now, with most modern camcorders recording onto hard disk drive, utilising either memory cards or bluray disks. Film can be easily transferred onto a PC for instant access and playback.

A perennial beneficiary of Christmas trading is the supermarket sector. It cannot have escaped the attention that Christmas puds have regained their old pitch in the aisles. One such store hoping for a golden goose over Christmas, rather than a turkey, is Tesco. Due to its size and visibility throughout the land, the company is not universally popular, but few would deny that what it does, it does well.

Last week saw the sad demise of Woolworths, as we knew it, but Tesco and others had taken its market share some time ago.

Spirits are raised over Christmas, and everybody is in need of some cheer. One such company hoping it will be is Diageo, the combined force of the former Grand Metropolitan and Guinness.

The firm’s best known brands are Smirnoff vodka, Johnnie Walker whisky and Tanqueray gin, in addition to its famous black stout.

The FTSE 100 briefly touched a new low on November 21, before the biggest percentage rally ever on the following Monday saw the market gain ten per cent in one day. The banking system and credit are showing slow but steady progress.

The Treasury has now handed over the funding underwritten to Royal Bank of Scotland, and the funding for Lloyds and HBOS is set to be in place in the new year.

It is likely that interest rates will be cut again on Thursday. The fall in property prices abated last month, and, who knows, with further lower interest rates, they could stabilise.

The next thing will be the BBC’s Robert Peston being optimistic . . .

* Anthony Platts is a divisional director in the Teesside office of Brewin Dolphin, and can be contacted on 0845-2131340.

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