The final tallies are in, and it appears brick-and-mortar took a shellacking over the Black Friday weekend, as more and more consumers migrated to the web.
According to retail analytics firm ShopperTrak, in-store sales for the four- day period of Thanksgiving through Sunday, Nov. 29, fell 10.4 percent year-over-year, to an estimated $20.4 billion.
Black Friday itself saw an 11.9 percent decline in showroom sales, to $10.2 billion, while the Thanksgiving Day take decreased 12.5 percent to $1.8 billion, reflecting anecdotal reports of diminished store traffic.
Conversely, online retail sales rose 21.5 percent on Black Friday and 26 percent on Thanksgiving, according to an IBM Watson Trend report (see chart below), while Adobe’s Digital Index pegged total Thanksgiving-through-Cyber Monday web sales volume at $11.1 billion, a 17 percent increase year over year.
That included a record $3.07 billion spent on Cyber Monday alone, making it the largest online sales day ever, Adobe said.
While much of the weekend’s brick-and-mortar traffic was sucked up by websites, Black Friday proper was also impacted by the confluence of month-long sales promotions and Thanksgiving Day doorbusters, which diffused the traditional holiday shopping focal point.
Source: IBM Watson Trend report
