Preliminary reports of Black Friday sales are starting to come in. The verdict so far: The crowds were bigger and people walked away with arms full of goodies, but shoppers spent only modestly more this year.
With shoppers scooping up discounted items, total sales rose a slight 0.3% over last year to $10.7 billion, while customer traffic increased 2.2%, according to ShopperTrak, which records sales and customer traffic at more than 70,000 stores and malls.
That's about the same annual sales increase in Black Friday sales as stores saw in 2009.
Stores may have cannibalized some Black Friday sales by prodding shoppers with doorbuster-like deals weeks in advance, said ShopperTrak founder Bill Martin.
Indeed, in the first two weeks of November, sales were up 6.1% and 6.2%, according to ShopperTrak.
"Retailers were very conscious of driving traffic early in November, and in doing so some might have thinned Black Friday spending a bit," Martin said in a statement.
So monthly numbers were up, especially for the first two weeks of November. But Black Friday numbers went nowhere. People are expecting great deals outside of the day after Thanksgiving, and retailers are providing them, extending deals to early November and even Thanksgiving Day itself. Those numbers aren't very encouraging. What it means is that there's heavy pressure on retailers to lower prices because people aren't buying otherwise, and that shoppers are expecting retailers to discount further.
Not a good sign for economic recovery.
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