Holiday shopping gets off to a frenzied start
Thanksgiving Day online sales could hit $2B for the first time, a 16% bump from last year
NEW YORK Thanksgiving has traditionally boiled down to three “Fs”: food, football and family. Many Americans can now add a fourth F to the mix, the “frenzy” that comes with holiday shopping.
We’re not just talking Black Friday. More and more folks are shopping in person on Thanksgiving Day, with major retailers such as Best Buy, Macy’s, Sears, Target and Toys R Us all opening their doors even before the last of the turkey has gotten cold.
And online shopping is off to a brisk early start. Shoppers spent $336 million between the hours of midnight and 11 a.m. ET on Thanksgiving, according to Adobe Digital Insights. And Adobe is forecasting Thanksgiving Day online sales to hit $2 billion for the first time, a 15.6% year-over-year growth increase. A record $820 million is coming from mobile devices.
Adobe added that half the people it surveyed expect to shop after 5 p.m. on Thanksgiving.
In all, about 137.4 million consumers plan to or are considering shopping during the holiday weekend, according to the annual survey released by the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics. Twenty-one percent of the weekend shoppers plan to shop on Thanksgiving Day itself, nearly the same as the 22% who did so last year.
Still, not every retailer is comfortable with the idea. There’s been a tug of war over whether retailers should be open on Thanksgiving Day, with some deciding to close their doors this year to boost employee morale, score points with consumers who dislike the practice and preserve the dwin- dling sales power of Black Friday.
Tom Alberty told The (Clarksville, Tenn.) Leaf-Chronicle last week that he doesn’t like shopping on the holiday because it takes away from family time. “You have 300 days to shop throughout the year. Why do you pick Thanksgiving?”
The Mall of America stayed shuttered this holiday. CBL & Associates Properties Inc. planned to close 72 of its 89 malls this Thanksgiving after keeping them open the past three years, and electronics chain hhgregg closed all of its 220 stores.
But most major retailers decided to continue this newest tradition of kicking off the holiday shopping marathon right after — or even before — the Thanksgiving feast. Toys R Us, for instance, opened its doors at 5 p.m. on the holiday and will keep its stores open for 30 hours straight.
Jon Hart of Asheville, N.C., has been a holiday shopping “door buster” for a decade. This year he headed to a Best Buy before the store opened. Hart points to a positive shift in customer service.
“The management comes out and takes care of you better than they used to,” Hart said. “They bring you a flier, ask what you want. They make you feel welcome. Before, they used to have cops out here,” he said.