Black Friday sales up just 2.3%

And that's with Thanksgiving day added to Friday's blowout.

How "black" retailers books are going to look is the real question. Prior to Black Friday, most big box retailers were bemoaning the fact that in order to get people in the stores, they used deeply discounted items. Typically, shoppers cherry pick the sale items and ignore the rest, reducing margins.

Bloomberg:

Retailers offered more and steeper deals on merchandise from flat-screen televisions to crockpots that, while luring shoppers, may ultimately hurt fourth-quarter earnings. Many consumers showed up prepared to zero in on their favored items while shunning the impulse buys that help retailers' profits.

"You could get the same deals online as you could get in the store, and yet there were still a ton of people out there," Charles O'Shea, a senior analyst at Moody's Investors Service in New York, said in an interview. Going out to stores, "is part of the experience," he said.

About 97 million people planned to shop online or in stores on Friday, with about 140 million intending to do so Thanksgiving through Sunday, the National Retail Federation said. That's down from 147 million last year.

Via: American Thinker

Continue Reading....