For the first time since I was dragged to mass by my extended family as a child, I am awake at midnight on Christmas Eve. Thousands surround me at our chosen place of worship: Chadstone, Australia’s gaudy and glitzy home of luxury and high-street shopping. We’re here to experience the surreal early hours of its 34-hour trade period, in which a vast majority of the centre’s 500+ stores stay open from 8am on the 23rd until 6pm on Christmas Eve.
It’s a curiously Australian tradition. Chadstone was one of the first shopping centres in the country to offer extended Christmas trading hours, 17 years ago. Other popular centres, including Westfields in Sydney, Adelaide and Brisbane now offer their own “non-stop shop” marathons too, as does the Highpoint shopping centre in Melbourne’s Maribyrnong. Each late shift features its own line-up of events and installations. This year, one such attraction went terribly wrong in Sydney’s Westfield Parramatta when a balloon drop at midnight resulted in five people being taken to hospital.
Nothing that dramatic happens at Chadstone. I arrive at around midnight assuming the centre will already be quiet. Chadstone report they receive around 200,000 visitors over this period. But still, I expected to find myself in an LED-lit twilight zone of haunted halls and lonely clerks. Instead, I found a thriving mall.
Despite the much-prophesied death of the brick-and-mortar retailer, the 34-hour shopping spree is still clearly a huge draw, due in part to the event’s fanfare, and the fact that online shopping can’t really account for last-minute presents.
A thick and steady stream of shoppers is pouring out of the brightly lit centre into the darkened parking lot outside, with many thousands more still milling around inside, clutching on to plastic shopping bags or empty drink containers.
The centre is as busy as I’ve ever seen an Australian mall and, even after 12am, there are plenty of families with small children drifting between shops looking for purchases. There is no overrepresented or underrepresented demographic present; teens lounge around plush seating areas side-to-side with fatigued fathers holding dozens of H&M bags, and young couples scrolling their feeds.
There’s not much reliable history of this kind of late-night trade, just a few press clippings and a poorly referenced Wikipedia page that suggests Victoria’s unregulated trading laws made the southern state the birthplace of all night Christmas shopping.
Shoppers at Chadstone largely seem to be unfazed by the fact that they’re doing their gift-buying at 1am. Even the centre’s employees tend to be unmoved by the unique conditions of their December work hours. “[Thirty-four hour trade] is alright,” a young MUJI employee working 9pm till 3am tells me, “Pretty exhausting. I think we get penalty rates, though.” For a worker in the last two hours of a nine-hour overnight shift, she seems in fairly good spirits. Her fellow employees, too, are largely bemused, not stressed out. As one staff member at the checkouts tells me: “It’s like an out-of-body experience.”
A lab coat-clad worker at one of Myer’s high-end cosmetics counters seems beaten down by the time she offers me a moisturiser sample, only 30 minutes away from ending her 10-hour shift. She began at 4pm on the 23rd, she tells me, and will go home at 2am on the 24th only to return 12 hours later for a five-hour shift setting up for Boxing Day, when she will begin at 5am.
“It’s always flat-out, this period,” she tells me, before pausing.
“This year is much quieter than last year, though,” she explains, a somewhat astounding observation considering how busy the centre is, even at 2am. Later on, while walking through the Mecca Cosmetica counter, the same comment comes up, this time from shoppers.
Despite reflections that the mall is less busy this year, it’s not hard to see the appeal of the 34-hour trade. By the time the clock strikes 3am, the constant conflict of light, sound and colour from all the open stores feels stimulating. Christmas carols clash with high-octane pop and throbbing EDM. This, in conjunction with the general sobriety being at a mall engenders, makes late-night shopping far less tiresome than many after hours activities. It feels entirely normal – fun, even – to be in Sephora after midnight if you’re surrounded by gaggles of excited teens and staff members painted in full faces of Grinch makeup.
The buzzing downstairs food court – which feels more densely populated than the rest of the centre by a ratio of around 2-to-1 – has a warm, communal feel. There are groups of young girls taking photos with their Boost juices and families sharing boxes of McDonald’s between purchases.
This is a social occasion for many attendees, as much as it is a chance to go shopping. “I pretty much just come because it’s fun,” a 21-year-old shopper named Harrison tells me. Accompanied by his girlfriend, this is his third year of late-night shopping at Chadstone. His gifts are largely purchased; this trip is just a lark. “I’ve only been the past couple of years but I like the vibes and the Christmas atmosphere. Besides, there’s nothing else to do at 2am anyway.”
