Jewelry and related fashion accessories have been the most popular gifts in the run-up to Mother’s Day today and restaurants are fully booked this weekend as families prepare to celebrate the special occasion, sources from the retail sector said yesterday.
The upscale Breeze Center in Taipei sold NT$1.28 billion (US$44 million) in luxury goods, mostly designer jewelry and accessories, in just six hours between 6pm and midnight on Friday.
The shopping center reserved this time slot for its VIP customers to prepare for Mother’s Day and sales were NT$470 million higher than during the same promotion last year.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
According to the Breeze Center, three of its VIP customers spent about NT$10 million each on brand-name jewelry.
Shinkong Mitsukoshi Department Store, the nation’s largest department store chain, said its month-long Mother’s Day -promotion campaign, which ends today, has seen an increase in sales of more than 10 percent from last year.
The department store said jewelry, shoes, branded bags and household products, such as home appliances, were the top choices for Mother’s Day today.
The department store’s sales target for the Mother’s Day promotion campaign was NT$8 billion, about 3 percent higher than last year, and the strong numbers to date suggest the goal will be easily reached, the retailer said.
Shinkong Mitsukoshi also indicated that restaurants located in the department store’s outlets -nationwide were fully booked for the Mother’s Day weekend.
Pacific SOGO Department Store also reported few openings in restaurants in its stores and said Mother’s Day cakes from bakeries in its stores were enjoying strong sales.
In addition, SOGO said sales of cosmetics during the promotion period had risen more than 20 percent year-on-year and sales of massage chairs were also 20 percent to 30 percent higher than a year ago.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,