Black Friday shoppers stay away from stores, $7.4 B splurged online
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — US shoppers made more purchases online on Black Friday than in the mall - hurting traffic and sales at brick-and-mortar stores, according to data that offered a glimpse into what is still one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
For the first time in several years, however, store traffic on Thanksgiving evening grew - indicating a shift in when consumers are leaving their homes to shop. It is also a sign of how Thursday evening store openings have continued to hurt what has traditionally been a day that kicked off the US holiday season.
The importance on the shopping calendar of Black Friday, or the day after the US Thanksgiving Day holiday, has waned in recent years. This is due to the choice by many retailers to open their stores on Thursday evening, as well as to early holiday promotions and yearround discounts. However, it is increasingly turning into a day when shoppers do not necessarily flock to stores but spend heavily online.
Also, for most retail chains, Black Friday store traffic and sales data is not necessarily grim as consumers continue to spend, consultants said. Winning the transaction, whether online or in-store, has now become more important for retailers than where it occurs.
Top brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart Inc., Target Corp. and Best Buy have continued to spend billions of dollars trying to expand their ecommerce operations to capture that growing online revenue.
Also, spending patterns over the weekend are not as indicative of the entire holiday shopping season as they were a few years ago, with purchases spread over November and December.
Online sales rose more than 19.6 percent, reaching $7.4 billion on Black Friday, slightly shy of estimates of $7.6 billion, according to data from Adobe Analytics, which tracks transactions at 80 of the top 100 US retailers. On Thanksgiving, it estimated sales grew 14.5 percent to $4.2 billion.
Numbers from ShopperTrak, which is part of retail data firm Sensormatic Solutions, showed that visits to stores fell a combined three percent during Thanksgiving and Black Friday compared with the same days in 2018.