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Grocery sales could rise by up to 5% ahead of England’s quarter-final match against Sweden on Saturday according to data from Kantar Worldpanel.
The data consultancy company said an additional £860m of groceries sales could be generated on Friday and Saturday this week. An extra 1.4 million trips are expected to be made to supermarkets over the weekend, with alcohol sales seeing the largest rise and contributed around £26m.
Sales of alcohol are expected to rise by 25% which will total an extra £26m alone from the grocery market.
Matt Botham, strategic insight director at Kantar Worldpanel, said: “We’re looking at an extra 1.4 million trips to the shops on Friday and Saturday. Retailers need to make sure they’re prepared for the extra footfall on a stock and staffing level – long queues and empty shelves just before kick-off are unlikely to go down well with shoppers.
“Alcohol will be the big winner – we’d expect sales to go up by a whopping 25%. This would bring in an extra £26 million to the market in two days alone, and over 30% of the extra shopping trips made would include alcohol in some format.”
With Wimbledon overlapping with the World Cup and a number of British tennis hopefuls still in play, Kantar expects the alcohol sales increase is also likely to include more Pimm’s and sparkling wine than the World Cup alone would generate.
However, while the impact of the World Cup will be felt up and down the country, London shoppers account for the majority of incremental sales caused by Wimbledon.
A spokesman from Sainsbury’s told Retail Sector: “We’re expecting to see a 50% increase in beer sales and a 40% increase in sales of pizza, crisps and dips, party food and snacks. Meanwhile, we’re also anticipating a bumper weekend at Argos with a predicted 80% surge in BBQ sales.”
Yesterday Retail Sector reported how England’s penalty shootout victory against Colombia has given the UK economy a £1.33bn boost.
