At a Kmart in Denver, Susan Montoya had almost the entire store to herself. Montoya halfheartedly flipped through a rack of girls’ holiday party dresses and looked down the store’s empty aisles.
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“It’s clear that consumers are spending”, says Jackie Fernandez, a retail partner at Deloitte.
ShopperTrak said Thanksgiving and Black Friday generated $1.8 billion and $10.4 billion in sales respectively.
That has led to the “graying” of Black Friday.
According to the National Retail Federation, about 103 million Americans logged on to do their shopping. The retailer sold an iPad every second throughout the day on Thanksgiving.
ShopperTrak, the Chicago-based analytics firm that collects information about sales and traffic in physical stores, but not online sales, reported Saturday that its preliminary figures show Americans spent $12.1 billion in stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, about 11 percent less than its revised figure for those days in 2014.
Year-over-year growth is getting increasingly harder to come by, as the weekend crowds proved. “Across the board, much less traffic than was anticipated”, Simpson said, without giving specific figures.
It’s still a key sales day for retailers, but holiday shopping promotions began earlier than ever this year. And in Chicago, shoppers snapped photos of demonstrators protesting the police shooting of a black teenager. Ten years ago, major retailers would focus on the 10 best items and discount them below costs, he said.
Looking ahead, the projections for Black Friday look like they will be another big boost to the e-commerce machine.
In Colorado, for instance, marijuana stores got into the act. A few outlets starting flirting with doorbuster specials at midnight, and now many of them open their doors at 5 or 6 p.m.to lure shoppers in with half-price specials you can’t order online.
The number of people buying goods online and by mobile during the holiday season continues to grow, but the average value of what they are buying appears to be falling.
Meanwhile, Chip Gentry in Atlanta headed out to stores instead of purchasing items online.
Still, the trade group said more than 151 million people indicated they shopped or planned to shop in stores or online during the four-day weekend from Thursday through Sunday.
“For the second year straight, customers in the United Kingdom have blown us away with their response to the many great deals on great products that we’ve made available for Black Friday”.
“This year, we saw Black Friday ads emerge before Halloween, as retailers aimed to get at the shopper’s wallet early”, Kevin Kearns, ShopperTrak chief revenue officer, said in a statement.
Because Black Friday was originally the domain of bricks-and-mortar retailers, today is also Cyber Monday – a day for online businesses to reward customers by slashing prices. She said Walmart didn’t have the tablet she wanted for her son.
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Holiday shoppers make their way around a Von Maur department store at the Eastview Mall in Victor, N.Y., on Friday, Nov. 27, 2015.
