US retailers see Thanksgiving eating into Black Friday sales
Print Edition
Thanksgiving Day is eating into Black Friday shopping at US retailers.
American shoppers spent US$9.74 billion at stores on Black Friday, the day after the Thanksgiving holiday. That’s a drop of 13.2 percent compared with the same day last year, according to preliminary data released on Saturday by research firm ShopperTrak.
The decline appears to be because more Americans were shopping on the holiday itself: Combined spending on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, which had previously been considered the official start to the holiday buying season until this year, rose 2.3 percent to US$12.3 billion.
The data show that Thanksgiving, which along with Christmas had been one of only two days that most stores are closed each year, is becoming an increasingly important shopping day for major retailers.
Black Friday used to be the time when retailers would open early and offer deep discounts to draw shoppers into stores. But a few retailers started opening on the holiday in the past couple of years. And this year, at least a dozen did so, with a few opening earlier on the Thursday holiday than they did last year.
The National Retail Federation predicted that 33 million, or almost a quarter, of the 140 million people who planned to shop during the four-day holiday weekend that ended yesterday, would do so on Thanksgiving. And analysts had questioned whether the holiday openings would steal sales away from Black Friday or result in people spending more overall.
“Retailers were pretty successful in drawing the consumers into the stores on Thursday,” said ShopperTrak founder Bill Martin, whose company counts how many shoppers go into about 40,000 stores in the US. But “Thursday’s sales came at the expense of Black Friday’s numbers.”
The decline in sales on Black Friday was the second one in a row. Last year, sales on Black Friday fell 1.8 percent to US$11.2 billion, though it still was the biggest shopping day last year, according to ShopperTrak.
Despite the big drop in sales this year on Black Friday, Martin said he thinks it will remain the biggest shopping day of the year for the 10th year in a row. But if retailers keep promoting Thanksgiving as the start of the holiday buying season, he thinks the holiday will eventually beat Black Friday in sales.
“We’re just taking Black Friday sales and spreading them across a larger number of days,” Martin said.
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