Australia Boxing Day 2016: Retailers expect shoppers to come in force again; food and household goods and apparel may continue to be top sellers

Apart from Christmas, there’s one more day that Australians look forward to every December: Boxing Day. Considered to be the biggest shopping day of the year, everything in stores are sold with big discounts and shops open earlier than normal to accommodate bargain-hunters.

If last year was any indication, the 2016 Boxing Day is expected to be another retail success. In 2015, around $2.3 billion were reported to have gone through registers across the country as part of the annual Boxing Day sales event, according to the Australian Retailers Association, or ARA. This reflected growth from previous years’ sales, which reached $2.072 billion in 2014 and $2 billion in 2013.

“This year’s Boxing Day crowds certainly did not disappoint, and if anything, were larger than previous years,” Russell Zimmerman, ARA Executive Director, said in a statement. In addition to physical stores, online shops also benefitted from the Boxing Day and all throughout the post-Christmas sales period, he added.

[READ: “Retail association says Boxing Day sales exceeded expectation”]

The Shopping Centre Council of Australia, or SCCA, believes 2016 will be another bumper Boxing Day, particularly in New South Wales. “2015 was a great success. Based on a data sample provided directly by our members, close to 1.5 million Sydney-siders visited a shopping centre on Boxing Day in 2015,” SCCA Executive Director Angus Nardi said in a statement. “This means that nearly one third of Sydney’s population enjoyed the benefit of the more relaxed approach to Boxing Day trading.

Food, household items and apparel were the best-selling categories in 2015, and may continue its growing trend. Department stores, hospitality and “other” categories also experienced an uptick at last year’s Boxing Day.

Boxing Day, which happens every Dec. 26, is also known as St Stephen’s Day, according to Public Holidays Global. This tradition goes back many centuries ago, when churches would open donation boxes and give them out to the poor. It was made a formal holiday during the nineteenth century by Queen Victoria.

Australians usually celebrate Boxing Day with food – in addition to buying discounted items from stores, they reinvent leftovers from Christmas.