So, where were we? After an interlude of two days, they queued like communists in the morning rain yesterday; hundreds of thousands of bargain-chasers bracing themselves for the struggle ahead.
Dublin's Henry Street was an antidote to the abundance of Christmas: here, every shop window told of something reduced, cut, halved or slashed. The Carphone Warehouse was even taking four days off the month of December, its precipitate "January sale" offering mobiles for only a cent each ("terms and conditions apply").
Though the queue outside Arnotts wasn't all that long, the lifting of the shutters at 10am was the cue for hundreds of others to move shopwards, like ants scurrying from beneath an upturned stone.
In they swept: some men, the odd child, an innocent passerby, but mainly women, focused and charging with the ardour of the newly possessed.
Whatever possessed them, the prescription read retail and, with Christmas Day barely passed, they all presented at Arnotts with identical symptoms: overexposure to the son (and the daughter, and the rest of the family), sudden (reverse) weight-loss, bouts of maudlin festive nostalgia, back (to work) pains. Nothing a pair of shoes for €500 wouldn't remedy.
"A lot of people will be back returning things next week, because they'll decide that they don't actually like it," said a shop assistant in Arnotts. "They just have a fear of not buying anything," she added, holding a pair of Pollini boots selling for €565.
They had all types in yesterday.
"You get a few flashy people who would buy these normally and you get people who would never dream of it. Old ladies like the same thing they get every year, but with 20 per cent off."
She said people; she meant women. Though it is an unaddressed aspect of our social state that there are males of the species, too, who will spend €300 on a pair of black socks, yesterday men were endangered on the ground floor.
Instead, they found respite in the relative calm of the upper floor, where the furniture department resembled a field hospital on an active front: among the mass of reclining men ("Aww, sweet. Check this out, bud"), a couple lay on the "King Koil Posturised Pocket" (a bed), adorned by an "Ambassador Headboard" (€30 off), looking like they might never get up.
Others wasted no time. At Clerys on O'Connell Street, Michael Ryan from Malahide had found the overcoat he was looking for, reduced from €399 to €299. "I came in, got what I was looking for and now I'm going home," he said, cleaving to the archetype.
At Louis Copeland on Capel Street, a calm had set in after the "hard-core" group of early morning shoppers had set off home for breakfast. No more do any of Louis's customers go straight for the cheap suit in the corner, he says: now the most popular brand is Canali, as modelled by the European Ryder Cup team this year.
"You could get a suit for next to nothing, but people don't want that . . . Our best-selling suit is the Canali. It costs around €800 to €900, but we have no problem selling them," he said.
For the not-so-flush, there is still something. A key-ring, for instance. In Brown Thomas on Grafton Street, a Gucci key-holder could be had for only €105. A branded wallet would cost three times that. "It's been excellent so far," said one assistant. "It's crazy, but with Gucci it's always crazy."
