Black Friday Bonanza - A Look Back

A line of people hungrily wait for the doors to open at the biggest Macy's in their area. 3, 2, 1! The doorman opens the door and a stampede of shoppers rushes into the store, grabbing everything seen in sight. Louis Vuitton here! Rolex over there! While these bargain hunters ravage malls, the big brand companies roll the cash on in. What other day could it be? Black Friday.


Here is a brief overview of 2009's Black Friday. More shoppers headed over to the discount and department stores at 5 AM (23% of all shoppers) and targeted clothing (51% of all shoppers) and toys above all else. Favoring quantity over quality, most shoppers favored many items that were priced less than a few items at higher prices. Therefore, clothes, books, and toys were more profitable than large scale electronic products. Moreover, the magic word was discounts, discounts, discounts this holiday season. It is safe to assume that the stores that promised 75% to even 80% off favorite items reaped in the profits this Black Friday with $41.0 billion spent by shoppers all together, says the NRF. On average, most of the Black Friday shoppers (63%) did not intend to engage in the also popular "Cyber Monday" but hadn't completed the majority of their holiday shopping. Instead, not even 11% of shoppers had completely finished their shopping for November and December. Another study done by the NRF shows that most shoppers still hadn't checked off their holiday lists by December 9th and that most intended to continue shopping until the week before Christmas, prolonging the holiday season. 


And with that I wish you all joyous and safe holidays as we all prepare for 2010, which will hopefully be a year of immense progress for America.


Question of the Post: Any predictions for 2010?


Statistics retrieved from: The National Retail Federation (www.nrf.com)