Are we tempted by deep discounts?

Car hire firms, hotels, cruise companies, laptop manufacturers, online retailers - they are all at it. The weakness of UK retail sales confirmed by some of the worst figures in recent years from the British Retail Consortium is prompting a renewed bout of deep discounting by businesses desperate to improve their cash flow and maintain sales volumes during the descent into recession. Pre-Christmas sales have been brought forward (to judge from one pleading email from Play.com this afternoon - forget it I use Amazon by default!) and an ‘unbeatable’ offer from a well known car hire company offering a rate of just £18 per day for a three-day mid week rental. I always thought that Hertz Van Rental was a famous WWI pilot?

How sensitive are we to these price discounts?

I suspect for hard-pressed teachers slogging their way through the November marking mud, the generous discounts on city breaks will be especially attractive.

And the incredibly cheap prices for new laptops from the likes of Dell are enticing although they serve to remind me of just how much I paid for my last notebook just under three years ago!

For most retailers it is a time when cherished profit margins are sacrificed in the search for saavy consumers. And it is a response to the flight towards discount shops at a time when household budgets have been put under an enormous squeeze.

Sales in bricks and mortar shops are declining - but online sales are defying the recession and taking up a bigger slice of total retail sales. This piece by Rory Cellan Jones asks whether the high street will survive the online onslaught?