Andrew KnollThe US's five-day festival spanning Thanksgiving Thursday, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, as-yet-named Sunday and Cyber Monday got a new wrinkle this year: the rearing of the Omicron variant's head.
The nation's voice of retailers, however, still projects record spending across November and December.
On Tuesday, the National Retail Federation released figures showing how much US consumers spent and where they spent it during the shopping frenzy. Nearly 180 million unique shoppers made purchases online or in US stores, a figure that exceeded NRF projections by more than 20 million and was in lockstep with the mean of the previous four years. The average shopper spent just over $300 across the five days, down about $10 from 2020. Some 84% of shoppers had already begun their shopping well in advance of Christmas, while Hanukkah began relatively early as Cyber Monday was the second of the eight-night celebration.
“Retailers have adapted and enticed customers with a number of incentives throughout November. The Thanksgiving holiday weekend remains a significant time for friends and families to check specific holiday items off their lists,” NRF President and CEO Matthew Shay said in a statement. “Over the last few years consumers have shifted their holiday shopping plans to start earlier in the season.”
Omicron curve
This year, the weekend brought news of the Omicron variant, which the NRF lamented but believed would further bolster the retail sector. Travel, live entertainment, movies and other such experiences could slip as they tended to at other turbulent points of the pandemic, opening the door for more spending on tangible goods. That would be something of a reversal of projected trends from the tail end of Q3 2021, which indicated that Americans, particularly younger ones, would divert more holiday dollars to experiential purchases.
“We know, unfortunately, that when the variants have had a real impact on the economy, the goods side of the economy has actually benefited from that because people change behaviour away from the experience side of the economy and spend more time and more dollars engaged in the goods side of the economy,” Shay said on a call with reporters.
The NRF affirmed its forecast for an all-time high in total spending over the holiday season, anticipating $859bn (£646bn) at the high end of its projection. That figure would represent 10.5% growth.
Mode of consumption
Brick-and-mortar locations experienced considerable increases in foot traffic, but online shopping declined, leading to a net drop from 2020’s totals over Thanksgiving weekend. In-person shoppers rose from 92.3 million to 104.9 million year over year given the rising prevalence of vaccinations and lessening of pandemic restrictions. But online purchasers dipped from 145.4 million to 127.8 million from 2020 to 2021.
Black Friday continued to buoy totals in both online and in-person sales, with its 66.5 million in-person shoppers surpassing the totals of Thursday, Sunday and Monday combined, and its 88 million online shoppers surpassing the 77 million on the largely Web-specific Cyber Monday. Despite inflationary pressure, supply-chain issues, a decrease in stimulus and the threat of the Omicron variant, the figures fostered confidence that Americans would be willing to spend this season, even if their preferred purchases and methods might vary.
“We think there’s a reason to be aware, a reason to follow the kinds of protocols we have been following all along about safe practices and getting vaccinated, but there’s not a reason to panic,” Shay said.
