Boxing Day

December 26th is "Boxing Day", which is big sale everywhere in Canada. The malls are very busy and open earlier than usual. Even though I don't really have anything to buy, my family wanted to go to the mall, so we plan to arrive at 8:00 a.m. at Yorkdale mall, which is probably the one of the busiest malls in Canada. Even regular Sundays are so busy that if you arrive there in the afternoon, you can't find any parking spot. Unfortunately, we were late by 10 minutes today. The parking was already full and the sea of cars were coming into the mall parking lot. After going around a bit, we spotted a spot at the end of the parking. We were really lucky. That's how busy it was there.
Inside the mall was busy. Some stores have a lineup at the entrance to keep people waiting until inside becomes not too crowded. Big name stores were mostly busy, but some of them don't really have real sale. It used to be that they had the sign says "50% off" and "up to" in small letters, but now they say "Everything is 50% off" and saying "exclude some items" in small letters. When it says "everything" and "exclude some" sounds like cheating to me, but this might work better with people. There are many way to promote sales. Some says "Buy one and get another one for 50% off", which is basically 25% off if you buy two, but "50%" in writing could be more appealing to people. Sometimes they don't have anything special but says "2 for $20", so people buy two. They don't realize 1 is for $10. That often happens at groceries. They say "3 for $30" then says "$10 each" in small letters.  
After my family finished shopping, we saw lots of cars illegally parked at bad spots, which made more traffic as the cars have difficulty going in and out of the parking. Then, they now wanted to go another busy mall, Fairview mall. I told them there would be no parking at that time, but they didn't listen and drove there anyway. As expected, two or three cars were waiting at every isle of the parking lot, so we had to give up finding the spot. They had some cars parked on the grass, then I saw the yellow tickets on them. Not sure how much they are charged, but probably it wasn't worth parking there and ticketed. I don't think they got that much of a good deal.
Although I generally like to see and buy things at the store, I do prefer online than going to such crowded mall. After we came home, my husband went back to Fairview by subway.

Image by dahon on flickr