The Dutch spend more time on Christmas shopping than ever before

The Dutch paid for their Christmas shopping with a card more often on Friday than ever before. The shopping streets were also busy on Saturday, possibly surpassing the daily record, reported the Dutch Payments Association. At de Bijenkorf department store in Amsterdam on Saturday, people were again queuing outside to enter the store. Also Albert Heijn supermarkets were busy with people coming to do their last Christmas shopping.

In total, the Payments Association counted more than 22 million payments with debit and credit cards at Dutch store checkouts on Friday, worth roughly 740 million euros. That is significantly more than the busiest day in 2019, the last year before the Covid-19 pandemic. On Saturday, about 21 million card transactions were processed, with a total value of about 675 million euros.

"In previous years, the daily record always fell on the last Saturday before Christmas. So perhaps yesterday's record will be surpassed today," explained a spokesperson.

Indeed, the shopping streets have been busy all week. Since last Saturday, more than 3.5 billion euros have already been spent in the Netherlands with a card. That's almost 1 billion euros more than in a normal week. A lot is also spent online, but not as much as earlier this year around the Black Friday bargain festival.

According to trade union FNV, the queues outside de Bijenkorf in Amsterdam were not just the result of the huge influx of people wanting to buy a Christmas present in a hurry. In fact, employees were also on strike.

The union organized campaigns at the department store for weeks, with some of the employees participating each time. De Bijenkorf admitted then that some departments were temporarily understaffed during that time. The chain, therefore, set a maximum number of visitors who were able to be in the store at the same time.

It was not only in Amsterdam's Bijenkorf that employees stopped working on Saturday. This also happened in several other stores and at the drugstore chain Etos, which even had to close several stores across the country. Etos found the action annoying, according to a spokesperson.

However, FNV demanded higher wages both at de Bijenkorf and in the drugstore sector. The union’s opinion was that employers should offer much higher wages than they have so far.