Issue of the week: Taking stock of Black Friday

What does last week’s post-Thanksgiving shopping spree mean for the retail outlook? asked Dan Ackman in Forbes. “Actually, it may not mean anything at all.” The National Retail Federation estimates that 133 million people flocked to post-Thanksgiving sales and that holiday spending is on track to increase 4.5 percent over last year—more than twice the group’s pre-Thanksgiving estimates. But while retailers are trumpeting Black Friday revenues as a sign that consumers are ready to dig deep, the results “don’t necessarily offer a good sense of the full season.” In fact, there is ample evidence that for retailers, Black Friday may be as good as it will get. Especially this year, said Paul La Monica in CNNmoney.com. With the country mired in recession, retailers report that shoppers made a beeline for the most heavily discounted items and largely ignored everything else. If consumers continue to hold out, “many retailers may be forced to slash prices to get rid of inventory.”

Some stores can’t go much lower than they have already, said Aili McConnon in BusinessWeek. On Black Friday, “Sears Outlet was throwing in a free washer for every $700 dryer sold, and Old Navy had scarves and hats discounted to $1.” But that’s the nature of the painful choice retailers face this year. Either they cut prices and move the goods off their shelves, or they risk getting stuck with unsold inventory in January.

Retailers hoping that online shopping will pick up the slack will probably be disappointed, said Mae Anderson in the Associated Press. Target.com reported a slight uptick in traffic on “Cyber Monday,” the day people return to work, fire up their computers, and promptly resume their holiday shopping online. “But with more deals advertised ahead of time and more consumers with high-speed access at home, the day has lost some luster.” In fact, leading electronic retailer Amazon.com no longer puts much emphasis on Cyber Monday. “We really look at holiday shopping as a season, not as a couple of really busy days,” says Amazon spokesman Craig Berman.

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Black Friday itself may be losing some of its cachet, said Stephanie Rosenbloom in The New York Times. JCPenney this year didn’t even offer an estimate of its Thanksgiving weekend sales, explaining that it wasn’t “a meaningful barometer of our business.” But other data suggest that business all around will be slow. For one thing, there are only 27 shopping days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year, compared with 32 last year. And consumers surveyed by the National Retail Federation say they’ve already completed much of this year’s shopping—nearly 40 percent, compared with a little more than 35 percent last year. “There is a sense of desperation among retailers,” says Hana Ben-Shabat, a retailing consultant at A.T. Kearney. Who can blame them?