Black Friday on track for ‘blowout’
new york — US shoppers hit department stores on Thanksgiving evening and spent $1.75 billion online by 5pm ET as a strong economy and rising wages drove a solid start to the holiday selling season.
While large crowds were absent in many locations on Thursday evening, it was not as bad as 2015 and 2016 when shoppers largely stayed away from stores on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, according to retail analysts and consultants.
Smartphone sales lifted overall online spending by 28.6 per cent by Thursday evening from a year ago, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracked 80 of the top 100 US online retailers including Walmart and Amazon.com.
“Thanksgiving is on track to be a blowout day... fastest-growing day that we have ever seen in terms of major shopping holidays online,” said Taylor Schreiner, director at Adobe Digital Insights, the research arm of Adobe Systems.
Consumers in San Francisco led the rest of the country with over 2.3 million online transactions, followed by over 954,000 in New York City, more than 415,000 in Dallas and 389,000 in Houston by 10.30pm ET, according to payments processor First Data, which collects data from about one million US merchants.
Electronics retailers such as Best Buy saw the most number of transactions followed by department stores such as Macy’s, according to the data.
Traditionally, the day after Thanksgiving, or Black Friday, kicks off the holiday shopping season in the United States.
But with US stores now opening on Thanksgiving evening, the typical rush seen on the morning of Black Friday has split up.
“Traffic is building up and in many places is on par with last year,” said Craig Johnson, president of retail consultancy Customer Growth Partners, who was visiting stores in Connecticut.
“It is also quite cold outside in many parts and that is hurting store visits,” Johnson said. The retail consultancy has 18 members studying customer traffic in different parts of the country on Thursday.
A bitter, record-breaking cold blanketed much of the Northeast on Thursday, with the week slated to become the coldest fourth week of November in four years.
Sarah Perez, a 26-year-old visiting New York City from upstate New York with her husband, did not enjoy the shopping experience at J.C. Penney because of a very long line at the checkout.
“We’re never doing it again,” Perez said, adding she had already done some of her shopping on Amazon before coming out.
Another visitor, 19-year old college
student Jack Ray from Iowa, said he doesn’t normally shop on Thanksgiving but the wait in front of Target from 3:30pm had been worth it.
“I saved so much money today,” he said pointing to one of his full bags.
On social media, the dominant sentiment remained in favour of online shopping with many identifying themselves as “Cyber Monday people” rather than Black Friday shoppers as they disliked large crowds. —