Americans may be over Black Friday: Sales down 11 percent

This year, retailers went the extra mile to attract shoppers to their stores, online or physical, including opening their doors on ‘Gray Thursday’ (or Thanksgiving, as it was once known).

However, the numbers are in, and it seems like one thing is clear: Consumers’ excitement over Thanksgiving weekend deals are waning. Could they just be tired of Black Friday and its ever-earlier increasing hype?

SEE ALSO: Latin American countries jump on the Black Friday bandwagon

Thanksgiving weekend sales slid 11 percent from 2013, dropping from $57.4 billion to $50.9 billion, according to the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) preliminary survey results.

These numbers came as a surprise, given the fact that most stores opened earlier than ever this year, showcasing doorbuster deals on Thanksgiving evening instead of waiting until Friday.

The drop in sales may suggest that most consumers don’t want to shop on Thanksgiving, yet online sales weren’t any better.

Online shoppers spent an average of $159.55 over the four-day holiday weekend, down over 10 percent from last year.

According to The New York Times, executives at the NRF were stunned at the unexpected drop-off of sales.

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Matthew Shay, the president and chief executive of NRF, said that one explanation for the surprisingly low sales could be that “there are a significant number of Americans out there for whom the recession is not yet over.”

Despite the low sales over the weekend, the NRF still expects sales to remain strong throughout the holiday season. The federation estimates sales will grow to $616.9 billion, a 4.1 increase from last year.

“It’s going to be a dogfight for the entire season every day, every minute,” Shay said. “Holiday sales are now a marathon, not a sprint.”

Shay’s marathon analogy may be right, as Cyber Monday is still expected to be the busiest online shopping day of the year, as it has been since 2010.

Many retailers are extending their online sales to “Cyber Week” or even “Cyber Month”, however, so finding knockout deals isn’t as likely as it was years prior.

“Cyber Monday offers aren’t super compelling, but don’t need to be,” Sucharita Mulpuru, a Forrester analyst, told the Associated Press. “It’s been the biggest shopping day of the year for the last few years, so they know that people are going to come.”

Even though more consumers are expected to shop online this year, the way in which they are shopping is changing. The NRF expects one in five consumers to use a mobile device to shop for deals on Cyber Monday, and the ease and convenience of shopping on smart phones is expected to spur growth of online sales.

According to IMB Digital Analytics Benchmark, mobile traffic accounted for a majority of all online traffic over Thanksgiving weekend, making this the first year that more people shopped on their phones during the four-day holiday weekend than on computers.

SEE ALSO: How Black Friday has squeezed out Thanksgiving

While in-store and online sales over the Thanksgiving weekend were significantly lower than expected, retailers remain hopeful that online shopping will be fruitful throughout the rest of the holiday season.

After all, it may just turn out that Americans are over Black Friday.

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