Retailers were and still are rethinking their Christmas advertising plans amid warnings that the driver shortage and fuel crisis will impact product availability and delivery over the festive period.

There has been a generous amount of warnings to the public about people starting their Christmas shopping earlier on in the year to ensure that they all get the presents they need. Customers have also been influenced by all of the news articles that went around about the fuel crisis. People started panicking as they did at the beginning of the pandemic, they started to get worried as to if they can get all their gifts on time or if they can get gifts that they want. 

Amazon also had a problem where they didn’t know what was going to happen so they made a statement where they have warned everyone that product supply and delivery in the lead-up to Christmas can affect what and at what point consumers can buy their gifts. 

As larger companies are more likely to be able to take a hit on not getting huge stock in more people are choosing smaller businesses over the large well-known ones because smaller businesses will find it really hard to survive another attack on their businesses. 

More people are planning to avoid big online retailers and instead of e-commerce they plan to shop locally and in-store to help their local economy and also to stop small businesses going even more bankrupt. Lots of businesses went bankrupt due to the pandemic which is also when the world started to see more e-commerce than we have ever seen. 

Due to more people wanting to support local businesses the large retailers are scared to make less money this Christmas. So what have they done? 

They have put aside a larger budget for their Christmas advertisement. They want to make bigger adverts to reassure customers that they have enough supply and that the businesses can still provide even when there is a fuel and HGV driver shortage.