Is there no such thing as a bad sale, and if there is, then how come we never hear about it? And this is the big one: If the sales are so profitable for the shops . . . and they must be, otherwise we wouldn't have sales at all . . .

then why don't they sell their stock at sales prices all year round?

Truly, the mind of a shopper is a mystery, even from herself. At Christmas, we pay full price for everything and then, three days later, we expose ourselves to the pain of seeing exactly the same stuff discounted. Why don't we just make the sales our annual holiday and move Christmas to February?

The country would be saved billions of euro and a lot of tears. The whole initiative would be a lot less tiring than going to the sales.

Successful sale shoppers are a secretive, ruthless bunch who never tell you when they're going shopping. They only reveal all those La Perla vests in July. "Oh", they say, "I got that in the January sales." Personally, I have never seen a La Perla vest in a sale. By the time I get there, the lingerie section is down to outsize bras and implausible looking knickers.

There is a growing suspicion that these women break in to the shops on Christmas day, suspend themselves over the Designer Section, and pick the place clean. It seems they don't like crowds either.

There used to be just two sales: one after Christmas and one sometime after mid-summer, when bad weather has rendered pale yellow clothing obsolete. But now sales, like travel and vegetables, have lost their seasonality.

Everywhere you look there is a bargain rail, at any time of year.

It is the high-street chains, God bless them, who have brought us the year-round sale. They just drop their prices when something won't sell because they don't have the space to hold on to stock that isn't shifting.

Although you can only wonder if there is a shop in Ireland left where stock does not shift.

There doesn't appear to be too much advice available on how to handle the sales, and this should be taken as a warning. They don't want the crowds to be too well-informed. I mean, telling us to avoid buying kitten heels, drainpipes and anything lowwaisted, as one British newspaper recently did, is hardly helpful.

At the same time, recommending that we buy anything metallic, plus a winter coat isn't very directional either.

But enough about fashion. The furniture sales are even worse, because the prices are higher and the mistakes are physically bigger. You can run from the chartreuse cardigan and pretend it never happened until you finally come to your senses sufficiently to take it to the charity shop. But it's hard to ignore the Wrong Sofa, or the Wrong Table, particularly if you are eating your dinner off the Wrong Table at the time. Furniture is also that much harder to bring back to the shopf oh sorry, you can't bring anything back to the shop during the sales.

It may well be that the sales shoppers are not the ones who get the best bargains at all. I suspect the real winners in the shopping wars are the shrewd old ladies who patrol the shops long after the rest of us have given up shopping for January, February and March. That might be when the real value is to be had. But we need a lot more research on this subject and we need it now.