Majorca prepares for bonanza at Summer sales

Joan Collins MAJORCAN shops predict that the Summer sales period, which starts tomorrow in the Balearics, will this year be much shorter than usual. They are also predicting that there will be bigger discounts in the first few days due to the shops having less goods on sale, thanks to the high level of sales during the Spring months and better management of stock. The secretary general of PIMECO (Association of Small and Medium Sized Businesses), Angel Pujol, and the Vicepresident of Afedeco (the Shopkeepers Association), Pedro Mesquida, were in agreement on this. Mesquida forecast that the sales will start well, because a lot of shops have started to include some of the Autumn season products in the sales with the aim of selling things faster. Pujol said that the expectations of small shops were “positive” in this sales campaign, although he stressed that during the Spring and the start of Summer there had been a lot of sales because of the high temperatures. Mesquida confirmed this and said that the results for the months of March, April and May had been “very good”, especially at Easter because of higher spending by both tourists and the resident population. According to Pujol, the shops have less stock than usual, due mainly to shops having made “a big investment” in new technology to rationalise the amount of stock they carry. Because of all this, and the fact that the sales will start with “large” reductions which will be around 50 percent, Pujol predicted that the sale season would only last for the first few weeks of July, in spite of the fact that shops have the possibility of continuing their sales for the next two months. This more than probable situation is borne out by the arrival of more tourists in Majorca this Summer, who are normally potential buyers of a lot of sale goods, especially tourists coming from countries with temperatures much lower than those in Spain. Pujol said that clothes and shoes form the major purchases in the sales.