Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘Super Saturday’ shaping up as big shopping day — again
Waiting until the weekend to do your holiday shopping? You’re not alone: Saturday may be the biggest spending day of the year.
Although Black Friday used to be America’s biggest single shopping day, the final Saturday before Christmas took the title four or five years ago as more retailers began their Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving Day — or weeks before, said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners. U.S. shoppers will spend an estimated $26 billion on Dec. 22, beating the $24 billion they shelled out on the day after Thanksgiving, the industry researcher said.
“Black Friday is not quite the epic event it used to be,” Johnson said. As holiday sales inch earlier, demand gets “pulled forward from Black Friday proper.”
Black Friday, now almost four weeks past, was still a wildly successful day for most retailers. With America sporting a growing economy, low fuel prices and rising wages, consumers spent big on the unofficial holiday. More than 165 million U.S. consumers shopped during the five-day Thanksgiving weekend, according to the National Retail Federation, spending $7.9 billion online on Cyber Monday alone, Adobe Analytics said. The buying surge helped boost retailsales figures from the Commerce Department 0.2 per-
cent in November, topping forecasts.
On a single-day basis, however, Saturday — dubbed “Super Saturday” in some retail circles — will be even bigger. According to the International Council of Shopping Centers, 44 percent of U.S. adults plan to shop for holiday presents or related items Saturday, spending an average of $173 in-store and online. That’s up from the 38 percent who shopped on Super Saturday last year.
Part of that is because confident customers are spending more in total this season, but it’s also due to where Christmas falls on the calendar. With Dec. 25 landing on a Tuesday, there are two full travel days between Saturday and the official holiday, rather than the one travel day last year’s Monday Christmas offered. That gives procrastinating shoppers all day Saturday to spend before packing their bags for Sunday or Monday departures.
“If Super Saturday occurs and Christmas is Sunday, then it slows it down. It’s hard to buy gifts when you’re on an airplane,” Customer Growth Partners’s Johnson said. “The classic weekend is perfectly situated for all these procrastinators.”
Luxury brands, like Tiffany and Prada, will get an outsized share of that spending, Johnson said. That’s partially because a big charge made Dec. 22 won’t appear until a January credit card statement, meaning it could be paid for with year-end bonuses arriving in early 2019. Late shoppers also tend to skew more male, though with 75 percent of overall shopping done by women, plenty of female customers will also be making Super Saturday runs, Johnson said.
And what if Dec. 25 rolls around and you’ve still forgotten to shop? Starbucks Corp. says many of its locations will be open and sell mugs, coffee beans and gift cards.