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The chancellor's VAT cut was a minnow among the whales of sales offers in the wet but busy streets of central Leeds today.
Shoppers were not so much ungrateful as far too busy angling for much more lucrative deals - £30 off Christmas party clothes at Debenhams or Free Taps With Every Bath at the discount plumbers down the Headrow.
"Two-and-a-half percent? It's nothing," said pensioner Rosemary Philips, down from Northallerton for a day's Christmas shopping. She and her two friends reckoned more to the hour's worth of free croissants and coffee they got when their bus arrived early at Boundary Mill and the tills weren't open.
"I can't see it reversing the current malaise," agreed solicitor Richard Sutton, who had stopped to listen to a broadcast of the pre-budget report in the arcaded Victoria Quarter, which houses Leeds' top-end shops. Round the corner, Edith Lloyd and Joanne Stavro, parking their full shopping bags in the doorway to Harvey Nichols, were unexcited too.
They bore out a comment from teacher Rosie Bramle, also sheltering from the drizzle nearby, who said: "Even on expensive goods like cars or computers, where you will get quite a few pounds off, it's not going to have much effect. If you're planning to spend that sort of money - and I'm not - you either can or you can't. Knocking £200 off a car or £20 off a computer won't change people's plans."
Mrs Stavro said: "Two-and-a-half percent definitely won't make me re-think, even after a lovely lunch like the one we've had at Harvey Nicks. If we have to economise, I think we'll just go shopping less often."
At the other end of the spending scale, three students from Leeds Metropolitan University mocked the idea that waiting until the VAT cut on Monday would leave them more to spend.
"I definitely doubt that," said Amy Beardsall, from Sheffield, who is doing childhood studies with her friends Hannah Beale from Hull and Kayleigh Forsyth from Penrith in Cumbria. "Look in the bags - six photoframes which would have cost £12 each at Urban Outfitters.
"We've got them at the pound shop - and they're exactly the same." The bargain, £6 instead of £72, dwarfed the Treasury version of generosity which Alaistair Darling was still spelling out on the Arcade radio.
Inside the shops, scepticism reigned for different reasons. Umberto Annecchoni, who owns the two Hip menswear boutiques off Briggate, said that there was a lot of stock to shift before any VAT cut benefit could be passed on. Standing between shelves of shirts and sweaters, he said: "I can't reduce any of this. I'm a small independent and I bought it all at the 17.5% VAT rates."
It will be Boxing Day, he reckons, before unsold items such as £30 T-shirts will come down in the usual January sales. In 21 years of trading in the city - for much of that time Britain's biggest retail centre outside London - he has never known the outlook so grim.
There will be some gainers, though, maybe including Max Clausen and Ian Drage, colleagues in the entertainment management business, though currently out of work. They'd forgotten the pre-budget report and missed the leaks about VAT cuts, which would have cut £2 off the computer printer they were carting back to their car.
"Oh well," said Clausen. "Maybe we can bring it back on Monday and try for an extra discount. Everybody could do with a couple of quid extra these days."
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