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.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Will California's EV mandate survive Trump, SCOTUS challenge?Today's Big Question The Golden State's climate goal faces big obstacles
-
'Underneath the noise, however, there’s an existential crisis'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
2024: the year of distrust in scienceIn the Spotlight Science and politics do not seem to mix
-
A bipartisan deal on the federal budgetfeature House and Senate negotiators overcame partisan divisions to hammer out a budget deal, but it remained unclear whether it would be approved.
-
The furor over U.S. wiretapping of its allies
feature The president faced a full-scale diplomatic crisis after leaked documents revealed that the NSA had for years tapped the cellphone of Angela Merkel.
-
The Weiner scandal, Part 2
feature Anthony Weiner acknowledged that he had continued to send sexually explicit messages online after resigning from Congress in disgrace.
-
The IRS’s Tea Party crackdown
feature The Obama administration was scrambling to distance itself from a growing scandal at the Internal Revenue Service.
-
Anti-American riots spread
feature A violent backlash against a U.S.-made film that mocked the Prophet Mohammed continued to sweep across the Muslim world.
-
Bishops sue over birth control
feature More than 40 Catholic institutions filed lawsuits challenging the new health-care law's mandate for birth control coverage.
-
Seeking facts in the Martin case
feature The parents of Trayvon Martin called for federal officials to investigate the prosecutor who decided not to charge their son’s killer.
-
Doubts over Greece’s bailout
feature The 11th-hour negotiations in Brussels did not allay fears that the deal would condemn Greece to years of recession and do little to stem the euro zone’s ongoing debt crisis.