The queues were long but moving quickly at the Commercial Fisherman's Co-op on Christmas Eve as Novocastrians stocked up on Christmas seafood.
Hundreds of people were lined up outside the Wickham shop on Sunday morning, where staff were working not just on serving, but also queue control.
Among the crowd was Matt Twist, whose daughter Izabella offered an extra set of hands for their feast.
He said they lined up for about an hour from 7.30am before reaching the store, which was on par with previous years.
The pair had walked away with tiger prawns, oysters, lobsters, bugs to feed ten people on Christmas day.
Sonja Ryals had organised a pre-order for four families to save a long wait on the day.
She was able to collect her two large boxes worth of seafood quickly while her two young kids waited in the car with dad.
Co-op retail manager Nathan Evans said the business had put a lot of effort into improving wait times and getting people through quickly.
He said the whole week leading up to Christmas had been busy.
"We found we've had an elevated sales all week and we thought that because Christmas was on a weekend - the two big days - that maybe people would go away for the weekend but it hasn't been the case," he said.
"We've been just as busy yesterday and so far just busy as we always are today despite the fact that the prices have been elevated on a lot of the lines, it's made no difference."
Nathan said they expected to sell about five tonnes of tiger prawns, a couple of tonnes of South Australian king prawns, another tonne of green South Australian king prawns, 4,500 dozen oysters and about 500 kilograms of lobsters.
"It's astronomical the way things explode at this time of year," he said.
