Christmas Shopping to Hit Productivity in Central London Offices

Research carried out has shown that million of pounds will be lost within central London offices as employees increasingly favour online shopping over the high-street. Support specialists ELAS have found that employees will spend almost an hour a day online shopping in the coming weeks, at a cost of over £5 billion to businesses.
Festive gift buying will cost £5 billion as email discounts tempt those within central London offices to shop from their desks, new research by a business support specialist has shown.
Salford-based company ELAS found that workers will be encouraged by email discount sites to respond as soon as they get the emails in the morning, which could potentially cause huge losses for businesses throughout the country.
The research has revealed that those in central London offices are increasingly spending the first 30 minutes to an hour of the working day reading discount e-mail newsletters from companies such as Groupon, before proceeding to spend further work time looking online for similar deals.
When including the time it takes to read through the original emails, ELAS expects full-time workers to spend an average of 30 minutes a day shopping from their central London offices in the run up to Christmas.
Peter Mooney, head of employment law for ELAS said: “Every year, more people are going online for Christmas presents, and even those who don’t will end up spending hours window shopping on the internet.
“But while in the past few years, we’ve seen that most workers sensibly do this in their lunch hours or after 5pm, the explosion in deals sites such as Groupon are causing people to do their shopping at the start of the day,” he added.
The company calculated that based on an average hourly wage of £12.60, the total amount of lost work time could amount to a total of £5.3 billion during the days between now and December 23rd.
Mr Mooney went onto explain his concerns, he said: “Those who leave the office and shop on the high street during their lunch hours have already spent valuable time in the morning looking for ideas or comparing prices from their desks when they should be working.”
“No boss wants to shoot a hole through goodwill and office morale by playing Scrooge in the office, but this time adds up and, in reality, costs money,” he continued.