Serving the customer
Stores fighting for Black Friday sales aim for convenience
Retailers are offering much of their Black Friday deals online, but shoppers still showed up at malls and stores around the country looking for discounts and also to take in the scene. Kati Anderson said she stopped at Cumberland Mall in Atlanta Friday morning for discounted clothes for her husband as well as “the people watching.” Her friend, Katie Nasworthy, was also hoping to score clothing deals, but said she went to the mall instead of shopping online because she likes to see the Christmas decorations.
Black Friday is expected to be the busiest shopping day of the year, according to ShopperTrak, a technology company. And analysts say Black Friday sales should be even bigger than a year ago. They are expected to hit $23 billion on Friday, up from $21 billion during the same year-ago period, according to MasterCard SpendingPulse, which tracks all forms of payment, including cash. Online shopping is growing, too: Adobe Analytics, which tracks spending at 80 top online stores, said late Thursday that Thanksgiving should reach a record $3.7 billion in online retail sales, up 29 per cent from the same year ago period. As of 5 p.m. Thursday, shoppers spent $1.75 billion online, a nearly 29 per cent increase from a year ago. It expects $38.0 billion will have been spent online between Nov. 1 through Thursday, a nearly 19 per cent increase from a year ago. “We are off to an optimistic start but there is a long way to go,” said Marshal Cohen, chief industry adviser of the NPD Group, a market research firm. He noted that despite lines to get into stores Thursday night, there wasn’t a “mad dash” to buy.
“The deals are available everywhere. They’ve been available for weeks,” Cohen said. Indeed, Black Friday has morphed from a single day when people got up early to score door busters into a whole month of deals. Many major stores, including Walmart, Best Buy and Macy’s, start their blockbuster deals on Thanksgiving evening, which has consequently thinned out the crowds.
Macy’s was pushing such door buster deals as 70 per cent discounts on cookware and 40 per cent off of boots. As of early morning Friday, the Macy’s flagship store in New York, which opened all night, had a steady stream of shoppers, mostly tourists.