Retailers ring in holidays with massive sales figures

Thanksgiving weekend food: diet-busting.

Thanksgiving weekend retail sales: record-breaking.

That’s the chorus being sung by retailers, industry groups and data firms tracking holiday sales between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. This season has been widely projected to reel in massive sales, thanks to rising consumer confidence, low unemployment and a solid economy. Add steep discounts, free shipping services and the aura around holiday shopping to the list, and you get a five-day bonanza that ended on a high note.

“Top line: This was a very strong holiday weekend. And this was a very positive indicator of where we’re headed over the next four weeks,” said Bill Thorne of the National Retail Federation.

More than 165 million Americans shopped in stores and online from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, according to the National Retail Federation. In that time, the average shopper spent $313.29 on gifts and other holiday items. The biggest spenders were older millennials and Gen X shoppers who spent $413.05 on average.

Still, NRF’s data show a slight dip from last year, when 174 million Americans turned out over the same five-day period. In 2017, holiday shoppers spent an average of $335 — about $20 more than this year.

But Thorne said the decrease is simply the result of a longer holiday season. There is an extra weekend between Thanksgiving and Christmas compared with last year, which could be prompting some shoppers to spread out their spending. And high consumer confidence means shoppers won’t feel as pressured to snap up discounts on one weekend alone.

“When the economy is good, they’re going to space it out,” Thorne said.

Cyber Monday handed a major boon to sales: This year, a record $7.9 billion was spent online, according to data by Adobe Analytics. The increase of 19.3 percent from 2017 results made Cyber Monday the largest online shopping day ever in the United States, beating last year’s $6.6 billion record.

(If you’re wondering just how much time it took shoppers to spend that much: Over 24 hours on Cyber Monday, Americans spent a combined 11,000 thousands years — or 95 million hours — shopping online.)

On Tuesday, Amazon announced that Cyber Monday was the single biggest shopping day in the company’s history. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined, shoppers ordered more than 18 million toys and more than 13 million fashion items, the company said.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.

Still, it’s hard to parse just how much more in Cyber Monday sales Amazon reeled in this year because the company doesn’t disclose that information, noted Brian Yarbrough, an analyst at Edward Jones. “Were they up 20 percent versus last year, or were they up 2 percent?” Yarbrough said. “You just don’t know.”

Amazon declined to answer specific questions on how much Cyber Monday sales grew in comparison to past years, or how much money was spent by Amazon shoppers on Cyber Monday.

Mobile shopping hit records of its own: Black Friday saw a record $2.1 billion of sales coming from smartphones. Taylor Schreiner, director of Adobe Digital Insights, said retailers know that most shoppers won’t be coming to them through a mobile app. So instead, they have to focus on building their online platforms for smartphones.