Can Black Friday sales burst last?

HURRY UP AND WAIT: Traffic greeted shoppers on Route 2 in Warwick on Black Friday. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD
HURRY UP AND WAIT: Traffic greeted shoppers on Route 2 in Warwick on Black Friday. / PBN PHOTO/BRIAN MCDONALD

Shoppers packed area stores and hit the online marketplace in force during the first weekend of the holiday shopping season, but some retail analysts worry the exuberance shown on Black Friday may not last.
“Black Friday reported an increase across the board, but again, we have to be careful of a false positive,” said Melanie St. Jean, who teaches retail marketing at Johnson & Wales University in Providence. “We have to look at that because retailers did open six, 10, even 12 hours earlier than last year. That’s business that otherwise would have been spread over 28 days.”
In addition to making the weekend longer by opening on midnight, St. Jean attributed the healthy first-weekend sales to aggressive discounts and “great promotional tactics.
“With the way that the economy is, people are being very frugal about where and what they are shopping for,” St. Jean said. “Before brand names were important, now comparison shopping is.”
A record 226 million holiday shoppers visited stores or websites from Thanksgiving to Sunday, Nov. 27 this year and spent $52.4 billion, up 16 percent from the same period a year ago, the National Retail Federation said.
Not only did more people shop over the weekend, which featured mild weather in the East and many stores opening at midnight, but the consumer spent 9 percent more on average this year than last year, according to survey data cited by the Retail Federation, boosting per-shopper spending to $398.62 for the weekend.
In Rhode Island, both national retailers and local stores said they were encouraged by the great start to the holiday-shopping season and are banking on it to continue.
“Friday and Saturday were super-busy and I think it will continue to stay that way until Christmas,” said Karen Beebe, owner of the Queen of Hearts boutique on Westminster Street. “I think people just really enjoy the experience of shopping locally.”
Just up the street, Craftland, which grew into a year-round market for work by local artists, opened 15 minutes early on Black Friday because of people lining up outside the door. Manager Kristin Crane said this year Craftland has stocked a little more jewelry than before and expanded the range of prices to include some more expensive items. So far, Rhode Island-themed items have been popular, along with stuffed toys for children.
“Every year we just hope to do better than the year before during the holidays,” Crane said.
Paul DeRoche, director of the Rhode Island Retail Federation, said he has been pleasantly surprised at the level of spending evident at area shopping centers so far.
“It has far exceeded our expectations because we were looking at an unknown quantity,” said DeRoche who, unlike many, thinks increased spending will continue until Christmas. “I was out [Black] Friday morning and the stores were packed and people were coming out with packages, which is a message that people have been saving their money. I think it will spill over into the rest of the holiday season.”
Unlike the national retailers, the area’s independent stores aren’t relying as much on deep discounts to bring in shoppers, but many local merchant groups have put together promotions to encourage people to shop locally.
Downtown Providence has a bingo card that gets stamped at downtown shops, while Barrington has a similar stamped passport. When both are filled the holder is entered in a raffle.
East Greenwich merchants are holding three themed shopping strolls on Main Street this year with carolers, and shops offering food, drink and discounts.
“I would say that we have a few new enthusiastic shops on the street plus the old standbys and together there is a lot of energy this year,” said East Greenwich Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Stephen Lombardi.
However, on Rhode Island’s suburban retail strips, like Route 2 in Warwick, shoppers cramming the big-box and chain retailers on Black Friday were only interested in the biggest bargains they could find. “I have been out since midnight and I’m a little delirious,” said Linda Tanso, 53, of Gardner, Mass., emerging from the Best Buy in Warwick with a copy of the movie “Bridemaids” shortly after 9 a.m. on Black Friday.
Even after visiting seven stores over nine hours, Tanso said she had only spent about $80 so far.
“It’s mostly for the deals,” Tanso said as she headed next door to Savers.
While shops may have been crowded on Black Friday, consumers still did much of their holiday shopping online.
Nationally, consumers spent $816 million online during Black Friday alone, according to ComScore, a Virginia-based digital-commerce tracking firm.
As retailers large and small move from the post-Thanksgiving frenzy to the bulk of this year’s shopping season, questions remain about whether Christmas coming on a Sunday will hurt sales and whether consumers may already be tapped out.
“People who shopped on Friday thought that they were seeing the best deals ever and 43.8 percent said they spent more than planned – a high since 2001,” said C. Britt Beemer, founder of America’s Research Group, Ltd., a Charleston, S.C.-based consumer-behavior research firm that did its own Black Friday survey.
Beemer said his survey also found that the 27 percent of Black Friday shoppers reported paying for merchandise with store credit cards, up from 16 percent last year, an indication that it was not an increase in wealth that drove folks into stores.
As a result, Beemer said his predictions for this holiday-shopping season remain unchanged from before Black Friday at an increase of around 2.6 percent over last year.
In the annual Black Friday post-mortem, electronics market analysts NPD Group of Port Washington, N.Y., reported that half of all consumer-electronics buyers on Black Friday made their purchases between midnight and 3 a.m., a figure that doesn’t necessarily bode well for a sustained rise in holiday sales. &#8226

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