And finally tonight...
Now that the Christmas rush is over, how were sales this year?
We visited two leading stores today, and asked them how business was leading up to the big day. Both Cellular World and Smart offered numerous deals throughout the holidays to entice customers. But now that business is slowing down again are some of these deals still on the table for the remainder of the year? Here's what their reps shared with us today.
Carlos Perez, Managing Supervisor, Cellular World
"Well, this Christmas sale this year, 2023, we must say the turnaround after all was good. The buying trend has changed from comparing to last year. And we can say we successfully forecasted that the buying trend as compared to last year, last year, were like bigger items, more expensive products and of that this year, the trend has switched to people buying more budget friendly items, you know, things on their budget."
"And we were prepared for that. We had stock for all budgets, technological devices for all budgets for people finding something for $25 or under for $50 or under just over $100, $200, you know, we had all the different items."
"And when compared to last year, that's what made the difference. Different this year, because the buying trend was more into like budget friendly products and categories of items."
Karina Canto, Digital Marketing Officer, SMART
"Well, for this season, Christmas is always one of our best months, as is for a majority of businesses, the people are always looking for deals."
"And this has been the first year where we had LTE devices for as low as $189. But we even went a step further because we understand the challenges that people have faced throughout the year. And we had devices for as low as $59."
"And if you did any trade-ins, it was low as $39. What we noticed is that people wanted extended deal time. Previous years what we did, we had like deals daily, what we call 12 days of Christmas. But what we did this year, we had, we even sweetened the pot further and we had deals on Saturdays, but also throughout the week."
"This just allowed people not to be restricted to a particular day. So they had ample time to come out, especially for a sleigh bell deals that we had on Saturdays. We did see a lot of people coming out because that's when they usually had time."
"And we even had early bird specials. We also had deals where if they sign up for any postpaid plan, they even got devices as low as $75. So we had a wide variety of deals that really just fit every budget."
