The US retail phenomenon Black Friday is here to stay in the UK, and this year it is going to be four times bigger, Yodel executive chairman Dick Stead has warned.

In 2014, online sales promotions such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday saw an unprecedented and unexpected boom in demand for retailers as shoppers took advantage of low prices in the lead up to Christmas.

As a result, some firms, Yodel included, admitted to being unable to handle the additional capacity. In January, Stead told MT hauliers needed to do more to prepare for seasonal peaks.

Yodel has conducted a customer survey to predict the level of activity over Black Friday this year. The results, he said, “are mind-blowing”. It found just 8% of Yodel customers ordered products on Black Friday last year, and that 30% of them intend to this year.

As a result, Stead suggested that free next-day delivery options are removed: the survey found that 76% of people said they would wait longer for their purchases. He said that Yodel could not cope with another Black Friday like last year’s while operating a 24-hour delivery service.

“I’d have to do an 800% uplift in drivers for the day and  triple the size of our delivery network. It just won’t happen,” Stead said. “If the research is right, and I believe it is, there’s a responsibility on carriers and retailers to think, ‘this should be good news, but how do we manage it?’.”

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