Placer data shows improved trends for last week's Friday-Sunday Black Friday period across retailer types (Friday and Saturday typically represent 65% of the “in-store” shopping holiday).
Looking at several major retail categories reveals that clothing (+1%) was the only one that truly surpassed last years' foot traffic. Beauty has held steady, whereas recreational & sporting goods (-5%) and electronics stores (-7%) were down. Overall, shopping centers were down -4%
Treasure hunt was also a preferred channel--including off-price, liquidators, and Five Below/Dollar Tree.
E-commerce had more lift and won shopper share each of the days (except Saturday according to the NRF), which was a contributor to the visit declines. For example, Adobe estimates that online spending was up +5.5% year-over-year on Thursday and +7.5% on Friday. Mastercard reported that online sales were up +8.5% on Friday and in-store +1.1%.
A favorable tone for the holiday weekend was also expressed by several retailers this past week, as we highlight below:
Foot Locker CEO Mary Dillon: “Over the Thanksgiving week period, we saw solid traffic levels and conversion gains in our stores and online. While customers have responded to our competitive offers, we also saw nice gains in ticket and basket size as our customer is willing to pay full price when the product is new, compelling and trend right."
Five Below CEO Joel Anderson, “We turned from a store wants in quarters 1 through 3, into a store needs in the fourth quarter. Our customers need to buy gifts, whether for their kids or their nieces, nephews, her grandchildren, or even office coworkers and we are the perfect place to find that awesome gift at an incredible value. Our merchants have sourced in our amazing line, fresh and trend-right products at outstanding values. We believe our customers will love our holiday assortment ranging from warm and fuzzy plush loungewear, pants and blankets, holiday Tees, Marvel action figures and more. While the biggest holiday weeks are still ahead of us, we are really pleased with the start to our fourth quarter.”
Amazon announced the “biggest ever” 11-day period ending November 27th (vs. others' 5-day period) with it also reading, “Millions of customers signed up for a Prime membership during this most recent holiday shopping event.” (Obviously, “millions” is a big number and that compares to their last “disclosed” figure of “over 200M” Prime members. None of the callouts of popular items caught us by surprise, what did was the forceful description/argument of all the value that comes with being a Prime member."
Shopify announced that its merchants, "reached a record $9.3 billion in sales over Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) weekend - a 24% increase from last year.” The sales volume was to over 61M customers, which equates to an average transaction $-volume of $152 per customer. To our eyes, that’s a large figure and one that implies: 1) the consumer’s purse strings loosened, and 2) Shopify has a more affluent customer, that customer is buying gifts, including bigger tickets. (The NRF estimates that the weekend’s shopper spent $321.40.)
