Columnist Paul Hickey is all in favour of Easter Trading and Boxing Day sales, but says trading on Christmas Day should remain banned. Photo / Ben Fraser
If there was ever a doubt that the online world was the new frontier, it has been well and truly blown out of the water over the past few days. Sitting down to watch a little TV on Christmas Eve, I was ready for the bombardment of Boxing Day sale
ads, but the new angle this year was the fact the big outlets were promoting the fact that the specials would begin online on Christmas Day!
While the Paymark crowd reveal how much goes through the Eftpos systems on a daily basis at this time of the year (which were record numbers this year too) we don't find out how much gets spent online, and it would be interesting to see how many people took the opportunity to do so. I'm all for avoiding the Boxing Day crowds in town, and would happily do it online, I would hope I've got better things to do on Christmas Day than go online shopping.
And this big push highlighting the fact you can go 'retail shopping' online on Christmas Day, once again reignited the debate over whether shops should be forced to close on certain days of the year. While I am 100 per cent behind the push to allow opening over Easter, I am just as much against letting them do it on Christmas Day.
Another big news story that would have meant less in recent years was the hacker group disabling the servers for the gaming systems Xbox and PlayStation. This is all kind of beyond my Sega Master System so I wasn't affected; if you were I hope you weren't too confused, especially if you had a new system thinking you had set it up wrong.
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