Black Friday sales begin at The Outlet Shoppes of the Bluegrass in Simpsonville, Kentucky, on November 26, 2021.
According to preliminary data from Sensormatic Solutions, traffic at retail stores on Black Friday dropped 28.3% compared with the same time last year.
Traffic was up by more than 50% compared with a year ago. Many shoppers stayed at home in 2020 due to the fears of the coronaviruses and retailers had reduced hours.
Brian Field, senior director of global retail consulting at Sensormatic, said that shoppers are shopping earlier this season. Shoppers are spreading out their holiday purchases because of ongoing concerns about Covid and the supply chain.
Sensormatic said that the peak time for Black Friday shopping was 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Black Friday is predicted to be the busiest shopping day of the season according to Sensormatic.
On Thanksgiving day, visits to brick-and-mortar stores cratered 90.4%. Target, Walmart and Best Buy decided to keep their doors closed on the holiday. Target said it will be permanent.
Field said that shopper traffic on Black Friday was the closest to returning to the levels seen in the South. He doesn't believe that mounting fears around the new Covid variant, omicron, had any impact on consumers' behavior on the day.
If governments and communities start locking down again, Field thinks traffic will go down. The trends will be very similar to what we expect.
Black Friday online sales were $8.9 billion, down from the previous record of $9 billion spent on the Friday after Thanksgiving a year earlier. It was the first time in history that growth reversed from the prior year. Over 100 million items are included in 18 different product categories, as Adobe analyzes more than one trillion visits to U.S. retail sites.
Consumers spent $5.1 billion on the internet on Thanksgiving, the same as last year.
The numbers show that the holiday season has been stretched out as more Americans began shopping in October. Retailers have been giving out promotional offers. According to a survey from the National Retail Federation, a majority of consumers had already started shopping for holiday gifts.
Shoppers are being strategic in their gift shopping, buying much earlier in the season and being flexible about when they shop to make sure they get the best deals, according to a lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights.
Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the year, is expected to be in between $10.2 billion and $11.3 billion, according to Adobe.
Shoppers can expect to find a variety of items out of stock, as supply chain problems have snarled inventory levels for some companies.
Out-of-stock messages on retailers websites are up 124% compared to pre-pandemic levels. Home and garden items have the highest stock-out rates, according to Adobe.
