Boxing Day sales: Mind over money Gone shopping: Throngs of people head for the Boxing Day sales. The hysteria of the Boxing Day sales is both deeply irrational and, at the same time, human. Thousands of people readily go out of their way while on holidays to stand in queues and dawdle through pushy crowds in pursuit of cheap towels. And yet, despite the day's significance being dulled by rolling year-round sales, the foot traffic at Sydney's major department stores on Thursday was the strongest in years. Floating through a sea of shoppers in Pitt Street Mall around midday, the Australian Retailers Association's executive director Russell Zimmerman said he had never seen the strip so busy. "I couldn't see the ground as I was coming down the escalators," he said. I could just see people. Australian shoppers were expected to spend $1.9 billion on Boxing Day, with about $550 million tipped to come from NSW. That forecast may have been modest. More than a million towels were expected to be sold at David Jones. And retailers predicted the figures would show the best sales yield since the global financial crisis. But consumer behaviour experts say the continuing draw of the annual bargain hunt says less about the state of retail than it does our culture and the psychology of sales. "There are two things we do on Boxing Day - we sit around and watch the cricket or we go to the shopping centres," Dr Gary Mortimer, from the Queensland University of Technology, said. The consumer behaviour researcher described it as "consumer ritualism at its best." "This is what we are conditioned to do generationally," Mortimer said. It's just part of our culture. Part of that tradition, he says, is whingeing about it. We say we hate it and we complain about the parking and the crowds, yet we still do it because it has become a rite of passage. He says a competitive desire to outdo other shoppers is partly what attracts us to the madness. There's this new emerging shopper coming through. It's not necessarily about economics and thrift and trying to save money. Shopping is almost a modern-day consumerist sport. And, like any sport, tactics are essential to optimal performance. Jennifer Reed, from Croydon, who has been heading to the Boxing Day sales in the city at dawn for 25 years, has fine-tuned her strategy. Her outfit is the same each year - thongs, skirt and top - so she does not have to use change rooms. She carries a shoulder bag to protect her valuables from pickpockets. An adequate supply of snacks and water means there is no need to stop for water. And, importantly, she heads straight for the top level when the doors open and snakes her way down. "It's just tradition," she said. You know, people have got their things they do every year. It's just sentimental. A senior lecturer in consumer behaviour at Deakin University, Dr Paul Harrison, says the annual crowds illustrate a psychological phenomenon known as "the scarcity effect." "We have this fear that if we don't do something we'll miss out, that we'll lose," Harrison said. So we are trying to reduce that risk. That's why everyone goes out on New Year's Eve. Once we get there, he says, we feel compelled to buy something to justify the effort. He calls it "the IKEA effect"- the tendency for people to walk out of IKEA with little more than a bag of tea candles. And these economic theories do not discriminate. Regardless of income, gender or culture, we are all susceptible to the irrational nature of shopping. Harrison says our preference for low-risk behaviour also explains why people prefer in-store shopping to online, as "people still see the internet as having risks." For the first time in its 175-year history, David Jones started its Boxing Day sale online on Christmas Eve. Myer and Target also gave online buyers first dibs on the deals. Yet purchases at bricks and mortar stores still made up the vast majority of sales. Mortimer says headlines about online shopping being the death knell to traditional retail are misleading. He said about 94 per cent of money spent by Australian shoppers this year was in-store. The chief executive of the Australian National Retailers' Association, Margy Osmond, said domestic sales between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve would total almost $6 billion. She attributes the consumer confidence to lower interest rates, an improving housing market and the change of government. If retail growth continues, Mortimer says there will likely be a softening of the deep discounts in the lead-up to Christmas, returning to the traditional post-Christmas sales. We've moved from that [traditional model] because of the GFC. Retailers really started to struggle and were looking for ways to keep the foot traffic going, so we fell into this cycle of deep discounting throughout the year and in the lead-up to Christmas," he said. If that recedes, it is likely familiar images of shoppers elbowing each other out of the way would become more frequent. "People used to camp out the front of stores and they'd rush through and you'd have people with fridges and televisions with hard hats on and you'd take a flag to claim your refrigerator," Mortimer said. But Osmond does not agree the Boxing Day sales have become tame affairs. "For the hardcore adrenaline shopper, being at the front of that dash first thing in the morning when the doors open is an annual buzz," she said. And I don't think that will ever change.