Boxing Day 2017 set to be biggest shopping day ever with Brits spending £4.5 billion

Bargain hunters queued since midnight to get the best deals

(AFP/Getty Images)

With half of all adults expected to hit the shops, Boxing Day 2017 looks set to become the biggest shopping day ever.

Dubbed, ‘The Big One’ by retail insiders, people are about to make history with a record breaking £4.5 billion splurge in the winter sales; a figure that’s almost double Black Friday’s £2.60 billion and almost treble the £1.67 billion spent on the last Saturday before Christmas.

Lured by price cuts of up to 90 per cent, some 23 million people will visit stores today many of whom were expected to queue for sales in miserable wet weather from midnight.

While sales at most retailers began at 9am, some including Next started as early as 6am prompting in-store staff to begin work as early as 3am and security guards on duty all night to manage queues.

Analysts suggest that today’s spree will be triggered by shoppers focusing solely on Boxing Day and not other sales days, The Sun reports.

It comes after pre-Christmas shopper numbers were down by 9.9 per cent.

Today, 13.6 million people will spend £3.43 billion in stores – up 11 per cent from last year - and a further 9.2 million will shop online, a study by the Centre for Retail Research found.

What’s more, there are expected to be more than 200 million retail website visits with online sales topping £1 billion for the very first time.

“Boxing Day is the big one,” said Professor Joshua Bamfield, director of the Centre for Retail Research.

“It’ll be the biggest spending shopping day ever.

“Shops said Boxing Day last year was the best day ever – even better than forecast – and the day gets bigger and bigger every year.”