News
Pre-Xmas 2014 Weekend figures down: Centre Manager
Mon, 22 Dec 2014 04:43 pm
By Admin
When Fairfax radio asked about patronage of the Centre over the weekend preceding Christmas 2014, Centre Manager Anthony Rafaniello said "I wouldn't say it was record breaking, but strong and steady". "It was probably slightly less than I was hoping for personally". He goes on to say "It was definitely strong and steady. Now we need to put this into context: Christmas this year falls on Thursday, last year it was Wednesday, so there's still three full days of shopping, and we're open till midnight tonight, then we've got the 34 hour trade. So essentially from now until Christmas Eve, there's only 8 hours the whole shopping centre is closed. so I think more people have left it slightly later, because a lot of them have finished work on Friday and they've now got three full days of shopping."
When asked whether it was because people were under financial strain, he said "I think it's because more people have left it until slightly later, but as I said, it was very strong steady traffic, I think it was more spread out, so that's why it didn't feel as chaotic. You know, people spread it out over the day, we are open until midnight everyday."
Mr Rafaniello said Boxing day is the busiest day of the year, followed by Christmas Eve.
When asked whether parking was a nightmare, Mr Rafaniello responded by saying "It definitely wasn't a nightmare. I think we've done a lot of things to improve the parking. Obviously on Boxing Day, with the number of people we have, it's going to be busy, but we still have over 9000 car spaces, more than any other shopping centre, we've partnered with PTV to add additional public transport services. For people that want to come by train, Oakleigh train station is the gateway to Chadstone. PTV partnered with us to have buses every 4 minutes leaving Oakleigh during the week and every 10 minutes during weekends. On top of that, we have traffic controllers directing people, and all our staff are parking off-site so in fact, we've probably got more car spaces than we've ever had in net terms."
The centre has its 34 hour trade from Tuesday 23
rduntil Wednesday 24
th
