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Norwegians spend billions of kroner on Black Friday: report

Xinhua, November 27, 2016 Adjust font size:

This year's Black Friday made Norwegian bank cards turn warm as between two and three billion kroner (234 million to 350 million U.S. dollars) were used on the day for good bargains, newspaper Aftenposten reported on Saturday.

"We do not have the final results until after the weekend, but based on what we see from the card usage, the day is one of the biggest shopping days of the year before the Christmas days start for real," said Stein-Arne Tjore, press officer of Nets, a company that provides payments, cards and information services in Norway.

Tjore believes that the results will be approximately like last year: 3.1 billion kroner by 7.6 million card transactions.

"That means the cards were used 200 times per second," Tjore said.

According to Aftenposten, the Black Friday phenomenon, as the traditional beginning of Christmas shopping in the United States, started to be popular in Norway in 2009 and in many places in Norway there is a "wild atmosphere and people fight for the goods."

Tjore said that the record of card transactions happened on Dec. 22, 2014, when 3.8 billion kroner were spent on Christmas shopping. Norwegians traditionally spend most on Christmas shopping the last three days before Christmas, he said.

Much of the shopping happens online and the electronics store Elkjop had 125,000 visitors during the first five hours on Friday, Aftenposten reported.

According to the report, Elkjop's last year turnover on Black Friday was 221 million kroner and this year the growth is expected to continue to rise and to be six time higher than on normal Fridays.

Atle Bakke, CEO of Elkjop Norway, told Aftenposten that the company's system crashed last year due to the high demand.

"In order to avoid the same, the website has been stress tested before the big day," he said.

Elkjop and several other shops also have the Black Week, a whole week with campaigns and offers, and have had 270 million kroner turnover since Monday, the report said. (1 U.S. dollar = 8.56 Norwegian kroner) Endit