Jayne Dowle: I’m counting the cost of Christmas price cuts

Thinking about how to afford the festive season is challenging enough, without having our heads mashed with half-price this and three-for-the-price-of-two that. And this year, I am convinced that the push to relieve us of our pennies is more relentless than Cliff Richard warbling carols on a loop.

Asda vows to cut the price of 70 toy lines. Sainsbury’s is having a half-price sale. Argos, not to be out-done, started its campaign in October with some complex three-for-one deal that tied me in such knots for Lizzie’s sixth birthday that I don’t fancy attempting it again on a grand scale involving more than one child.

And I daredn’t even look down the toy aisles in Tesco when I popped in the other day. All I could see was a sea of plastic and placards waving at me. Talk about Nightmare Before Christmas.

I began to imagine Toy Story 3 coming to life and that big pink bear grabbing me and pulling me in. If I find myself unavoidably having to take the children with me when I have to go on a grocery run, I’m going to have to tie them up outside. If I don’t, you won’t see us until the New Year.

There is always online, of course, but all I would say to that is beware of websites offering false promises. Online sales are expected to rise by 16.3 per cent this year to £13.4bn, while old-fashioned shopping in stores is predicted to fall, says the Centre for Retail Research.

But if you reckon that the internet will save your toy-buying life, you have obviously never tried it. Just when you think you have constructed a mind-blowing (we mothers have to get our kicks somewhere) deal involving Barbie, Ken and a special edition tin of Moshi Monsters, the site freezes and crashes, taking your last two hours’ labour with it.

Losing a vital work presentation is as nothing compared to the disappearance of your children’s dreams under an “Internet explorer has stopped working” banner.

I am sure that that those in charge of running our supermarkets and major stores would argue that they are doing all this price-cutting and deal-making for the benefit of us, the customers. But don’t you think it is just a tiny bit cynical to manipulate us like this? Just charge a fair price and be done with it I say.

I don’t know about you, but I am becoming heartily sick of having to try and remember who is charging what for what, and whether the price has gone up or down, and what date a certain super-discount sale starts. I long for those simple days when I could just walk into the shop, look around, see a reasonable price for something and hand over the money. I am sure I haven’t imagined it, but I think shopping was like that once.

Perhaps it was when I was seven or eight and my aunty and uncle used to take me and my sister to Redgates toy shop in Sheffield on the bus to choose something special.

What happened to sitting the children down one cosy evening with a piece of paper and a pencil, getting them to write a cute little Christmas present list, and shoving up the chimney or behind the gas-fire? Now the whole undertaking requires more forward planning than the retreat from Moscow.

And, deal or no deal, we’re talking a serious investment of cash. Nothing much on the top 10 list of this year’s must-haves costs less than £40. At the school gate the other morning one of the other mothers, in that random, apropos of nothing way that sleep-deprived parents have before 9am, suddenly started ranting about Lego. “Seventy pounds for a police station!” she spluttered. “I could have bought a real one for that.”

Some lucky children, it is rumoured, are to receive an iPad from Santa. The unlucky children in this house will just have to make do with mummy and daddy’s laptops for the foreseeable. Apparently, according to Asda, the average child is expecting at least 10 presents this year. Thanks for that particular survey. Nothing like upping the ante even further, is there?

I’ve told mine that they are having a £10 gift voucher each. They can choose the shop. It started as a joke but, so far, no one has actually asked for anything else. Even retail queen Lizzie has not so much as picked up a pen to circle her items of choice in the Argos catalogue.

I can’t work out if this is because they have finally got everything they need, want and desire, or because like me, they too are exhausted and overwhelmed by the whole business. Retail fatigue in the under-10s? If it’s true, then the supermarket chiefs have got something bigger to worry about than Christmas.