This year, for instance, sales fell 1.5% on Black Friday excluding online sales, according to ShopperTrak.
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Best Buy reported that weekend shoppers bought hundreds of thousands of TVs, millions of movies, music and games, and twice as many “wearables”, such as smart watches and health-and-fitness trackers, as a year ago.
That shift has caused the National Retail Federation, the nation’s largest retail trade group, to overhaul the way it tracks spending and visits during the four-day Thanksgiving weekend – something it’s been doing for more than a decade. That’s below last year’s 4.1 percent growth. It stuck by its forecast of a 2.4 percent increase for November and December sales.
That’s up from the group’s mid-November survey, which projected 136 million people planned to shop over the long weekend.
But those big-box stores and shopping malls probably aren’t going anywhere yet. But a change in methodology means that figure isn’t comparable to those from prior years.
Analysts Springboard said the fall in shopper numbers on Black Friday 2015 was due to a “significant increase” in online bargain hunters which saw traffic soar by 12% compared to past year.
The average spending per person over the weekend reached $229.60.
About 77.6 percent polled said they had at least started their holiday shopping. The Verizon Retail Index estimated that broadband traffic from e-commerce was up 18% on Saturday and 21% on Sunday compared with normal daily volumes.
For the first time in American history, it looks like Black Friday shoppers went online more than to stores.
Black Friday was not as crowded or hectic as years in the past, retail experts say it is still a big shopping day but the number of people who get to stores at the crack of dawn is dwindling. “The decrease in shopper visits on Thanksgiving Day also lends itself to the social backlash against store openings on the holiday”.
Brick-and-mortar sales declined for those two days in 2015.
Adobe says a record-breaking amount of that online shopping happened on mobile devices: 34 percent of sales, actually.
The rush on the night of the United States holiday, a month before Christmas, reflects the new normal in United States holiday shopping, which was traditionally kicked off the next day, Black Friday.
“For new categories, historically, over half of the volume in early years shows up in the fourth quarter”, Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association, said on Sunday. “I think we’ll see that trend with smartwatches this year”, he said.
But it said it expects that pent-up consumer demand and low gasoline prices will boost this year’s holiday spending in the U.S.by 3.7 per cent.
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But business varied from store to store over the long weekend, as hours and special deals were extended to both before and after the day after Thanksgiving.
