Confessions of a Corporate Shopaholic

The royal wedding is just a day away, and for some reason the Americans seem to be way more excited than some Brits over the event.  All the prominent network news anchors will be reporting on location this week, and will be broadcasting live starting from 4am Eastern time on Friday.  Apparently, what’s happening in Libya, Syria or Japan aren’t going to cut it.  Are the Americans fantasizing over fairy tales of princes and princesses, or are they longing for some good news to divert their attention from all that suffering we see on the news?

I can’t help to notice that aside from the union of William and Kate, Friday’s spectacle is the ultimate public endorsement of the UK’s national standing and economy.  Take a look of these facts.

• Some 550,000 people will experience the event in person in the Westminster environs, nearly a million plan to watch it on big screen and over twenty million will favour the convivial experience of huddling round a television. Half a million will watch it on the internet and 51,000 will watch it on a mobile phone.
• 295,000 Londoners travel into Central London to experience the event.
• Time off: Over six million adults will be taking extra holidays to make the most of the confluence of Easter, the bank holidays and the Royal Wedding. Workers from London (17%) and the West Midlands (17%) being the most likely to do this, while employee from the South West (7%) and Scotland (9%) the least likely.
• Economic benefit: PwC calculates the commercial benefit to London from visitors’ expenditure to be £107 million.
• 560, 000 adults are travelling to London from around the UK for the wedding – regional groupings ranging from 69,000 from Scotland to 17,000 from North East England. While the vast majority will be travelling with friends or family, over 50,000 will be travelling alone.
• Travel: Travellers choose car, tube and train as the most popular form of transport to get to (Central) London for the wedding. Interestingly, the bicycle is a more popular choice of transport than the bus.
• 37% of visitors will stay only for the day, but one in five intends to stay for two nights. Men intend to stay longer than women.
• Accommodation: 185,000 people will stay in hotels, 50,000 in B&Bs. 18,000 will stay with friends.
• A quarter of the visitors will spend between £50 and £75 a night on accommodation. One in five will spend between £100 and £149. Over 20, 000 people will spend upwards of £300 a night.
• Shopping: Over two-thirds of visitors will go shopping while they are here and well over half intend to visit bars, clubs and restaurants. 58% say they will visit tourist attractions while they are in London, with 36% of visitors budgeting to spend between £75 and £99 per person per day on tourist attractions.
• Shopping centres (eg. Westfield Centre, Brent Cross) will be the most popular shopping destinations followed by famous shopping streets (eg. Oxford Street, Carnaby Street) followed by well-known street markets (eg. Portobello Road, Brick Lane).
• One in five people have budgeted £75-£99 for shopping per day while, at the more extravagant end, 13% say they have budgeted £200-299 per day.
• The night economy: 60% of people intend to go to the pub, 45% are going to nightclubs, 40% will go to restaurants, 26% to theatres, 24% to cinemas and 7% to casinos.
• Finally, when asked what they would spend their royal wedding budget on if they weren’t travelling to the wedding, 35% said general living expenses which may lead some to conclude the boost for the London business will be counterbalanced by a negative impact elsewhere. 27% said they would put the money into savings and one in four said they would make debt repayments or pay off credit card bills.

The survey was conducted by PwC.

Last but not least, London is expecting to bring in over 1 billion pounds (1.6526 billion U.S. dollars) from the sales of merchandise, estimating the sale of over 20 million bottles of beer and over 4 million bottles of champagne!  Hmm, I really can’t see myself toasting champagne over the royal wedding.  To be honest, I can think of a million better reasons to down my champagne, any day of the week.