Shoppers flocked to malls and spent record sums online over the Thanksgiving weekend, starting the holiday shopping season off at a robust clip. A record 247 million people visited stores or shopped online, and total spending hit an estimated $59.1 billion, 13 percent more than last year. Online spending on Black Friday alone topped $1 billion for the first time. Cyber Monday sales also set a new record, jumping 20 percent over last year to $1.5 billion. Some large retailers opened on Thanksgiving Day to entice shoppers with doorbuster deals. Michelle Huff lined up outside a St. Louis–area Toys R Us at 1:30 p.m. on Thanksgiving for the store’s 8 p.m. opening. “It cuts into family time,” she said, but shopping early is “a tradition.”
Expanding Black Friday sales into Thanksgiving isn’t a smart move for retailers, said Brad Tuttle in Time.com. Store foot traffic was up on Friday over last year while in-store sales were slightly down, “giving credence to the theory that many shoppers were there just for the purposes of browsing” and checking out goods they would buy online later.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are pure hype anyway, said Neil Irwin in WashingtonPost.com. “Sales over Thanksgiving weekend tell us virtually nothing about retail sales for the full holiday season—let alone anything meaningful about the economy as a whole.” The media gets a “ready-made story” on a slow news weekend, while retailers compete for a few more consumer dollars by waging an “opening-time arms race.”
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The entire exercise is “carefully designed to make you behave like an idiot,” said Kevin Roose in NYMag.com. “Between retail tricks and your own cognitive flaws, you have almost no chance of actually saving money” on these supposed holiday deals. “Enduring cold, dark misery for the shot at cheap electronics” has become our own “nationwide experiment in consumer irrationality, dressed up as a cheerful holiday add-on.” Consider it a new American tradition.
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