Black Friday: consumers shrug off gloom to carry on shopping

The “Black Friday” shopping bonanza following Thanksgiving may be an American import, but it’s increasingly important to British retailers – and the omens ahead of this year’s event didn’t look too bright, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. The day fell “hard on the heels” of the Budget, and coincided with economic forecasts of such gloom from the Institute for Fiscal Studies that one might have thought “citizens reading of unprecedented lost decades of wage growth” would have been “inclined to slit their wrists”. Instead, it seems, they went shopping. Early tallies show that overall spending on the day was up on a year ago, “despite a drop in the number of shoppers visiting stores”, said Sarah Butler and Zoe Wood in The Guardian. Barclaycard, which processes nearly half of all debit and credit card transactions in the UK, estimated that Black Friday spending rose by 8% on last year’s jamboree, with shoppers predicted to spend £2.5bn on the day itself. The surge was mainly down to a sharp increase in internet spending: “Britain’s online retailers won the battle for sales.” But some shops held up well. “We traded well in both shops and online, with shops becoming increasingly busy as the weekend progressed,” said Dino Rocos, operations director at John Lewis.

Black Friday splits retailers, said Joanna Bourke and Alex Lawson in the London Evening Standard. Some question “whether mass discounting amid the festive shopping season is wise for margins and profits”; refuseniks this year included M&S and Ikea. But others, including James Daunt, boss of the bookshop chain Waterstones, welcome it, said Brummer. Daunt, who is waging a campaign against the online might of Amazon, embraces Black Friday as “retail theatre”. It gives his shops a “very good December day” in November.