Shopping Season Takes Off – Consumers Ready to Spend
The holiday spirit is in the air! These few weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are when retailers rack up 20% of their annual sales. ShopperTrak reported that Black Friday shopping deals this year had 226 million consumers spending an average of $398.62 each on their holiday shopping. This is a 6.6% increase from the previous year. MasterCard Advisors' SpendingPulse said for this four-day weekend, consumer spending was up 8.7 percent compared with last year, totaling approximately $50.06 billion. The National Retail Federation put this shopping total at a record $52.4 billion. This is quite a relief for many businesses as consumers seem to be quite willing to spend on their Christmas shopping this year. BIGResearch conducted a NRF survey which revealed that 28.7 million people did their shopping online and at stores on Thanksgiving Day, up from 22.2 million last year, and 86.3 million hit brick-and-mortar stores for Black Friday shopping deals, with the number of midnight shopping seeing a 9.5% increase. BIGResearch also reported that department and discount stores were the biggest beneficiaries of consumers' shopping sprees, followed by clothing, drug, grocery, electronics and craft stores. An interesting trend that has been noticed is that instead of on-the-spot buys, 37.4% of consumers nowadays research products and compare prices on their tablets and smartphones while shopping itself.