After the Black Friday flop, shops can get back to what they do best

The high street flopperoo that was ‘Black Friday’ may have something to do with terrorism fears, or even the downturn of the Chinese economy: in last year’s ugly scenes of bargain-hunters wrestling over televisions, Chinese tiger–shoppers seemed to win most of the spoils. But this year you could have held a picnic in the entrance of an Oxford Street store without fear of being trampled; trade had migrated massively online, where total UK sales are estimated to have passed £1 billion in a day for the first time and to have peaked (how sad is this?) between midnight and one in the morning. Amazon alone processed 7.4 million purchases in 24 hours.

If we’re lucky, the soul-crushing American concept of Black Friday as a great day out in a shopping mall (invented in Philadelphia in the early 1960s, to fill a lull after the Thanksgiving holiday) will fade as fast as it rose over here in the past two years, and the media will make a meal of Cyber Monday instead. But retailers who are sufficiently shrewd, specialised and valued by regular customers to have survived the online revolution thus far, or turned it to their advantage, will continue to do so — if the Living Wage doesn’t cripple them, and the government at last comes up with a business-rates review that eases their cost burden. Be sure to save some of your Christmas shopping for your friendly local stores.

Highly unlikely

The delivery of George Osborne’s Autumn Statement was notable for the way he held eye contact with Labour’s front bench as he escaped his tax-credit embarrassment and pulled other rabbits out of his hat. But earlier in the speech I thought I spotted a nervous upward glance towards the Commons rafters — a check, perhaps, for the presence of that elusive creature on which I have myself been trying to keep a beady eye lately: I refer of course to the writhing python of global economic doom.