Shoppers rush to grab electric griddles and slow cookers, on sale for $8, shortly after the doors opened Friday at a J.C. Penney in Las Vegas.(Photo: Julie Jacobson, AP)
Retailers are already calling the biggest holiday shopping "weekend" of the season the best ever.
All signs point to a huge Cyber Monday, as more consumers turned to computers and mobile devices to begin looking for deals over the weekend.
More
shoppers came out Thanksgiving night, more shoppers hit stores on Black
Friday, more shopped online. And everyone spent more.
The
result: more than $59 billion in estimated sales from Thursday through
Sunday, courtesy of 247 million shoppers, according to a BIGInsight
survey conducted for the National Retail Federation.
That's up
from $52.4 billion and 226 million shoppers last year (shoppers are
counted more than once if they shop on more than one day).
Some
shoppers who showed up at stores Thursday night ended up making
purchases online. Megan Sullivan, 26, was too far back in line at the
Best Buy electronics retailer in Aurora, Colo., to receive a voucher for
the 50-inch Toshiba TV she wanted, selling for $399. Instead, she
bought left and ended up buying a 40-inch Samsung TV on Amazon for $427.
"While
it would have been better to get the one at Best Buy," she says, "it
wasn't worth getting in line any earlier." Sullivan showed up to Best
Buy around 8:30 p.m. Thursday for the midnight opening.
Ultimately,
the competition between online and bricks-and-mortar stores means Black
Friday and Cyber Monday are becoming one and the same, says Matt Shay,
CEO of National Retail Federation.
"What we're going to see is
that the two become further and further indistinguishable from one
another," he says. "Everyone is playing everywhere now."
On
average, almost 41% of a consumer's total spending for the weekend was
online, the BIGInsight survey shows. The online shopping continues, with
more than half of consumers planning to shop Cyber Monday, according to
BIGInsight. The number of shoppers online today is expected to hit 129
million, up from about 122 million last year, the data show.
Online
sales for Thanksgiving and Black Friday - days that retailers have
either traditionally never been open (Thanksgiving) or have boasted
strictly in-store sales - were up almost 20% from the same two days in
2011, according to data from IBM Smarter Commerce.
Thursday is
also encroaching on Black Friday as retailers choose to open earlier on
Thanksgiving night. Walmart, Sears and Toys R Us were among retailers
that opened doors at 8 p.m. Thursday.
In-store sales decreased 1.8% on Black Friday vs. 2011, hitting $11.2
billion, according to ShopperTrak, a retail technology company that
tracks store traffic.
"The early Thursday openings kind of bleached some of the money out of Friday," says Bill Martin, founder of ShopperTrak.
But
foot traffic on Black Friday was up 3.5% with more than 300 million
store visits, the ShopperTrak data show. Martin says it's because more
consumers were walking into stores to browse but weren't necessarily
buying.
USA Today