For American shoppers, Thanksgiving is more than just a day that brings family together to enjoy a feast of turkey, stuffing, and homemade macaroni and cheese. It is the eve of the cheapest day of the year to spend money. Black Friday has become a staple of the Thanksgiving holiday season, serving as the day where the overwhelming majority of gifts to be unwrapped on Christmas day are purchased. This year, however, was a little different than years past. This past Black Friday, a lot less people flooded their local mall than usual.
Sales this Thanksgiving and Black Friday both fell in store, with more shoppers finding it easier to beat the surplus of savages searching for a deal at dawn by taking advantage of discounts online. Also, according to ShopperTrak, Black Friday in store sales fell from $11.6 billion in 2014 to $10.4 billion this year. In store sales on Thanksgiving fell from over $2 billion to $1.8 billion. Both of these decreases are a result of the 14% increase in online shopping traffic on Black Friday grossing $2.72 billion on its own. This jump in online shopping came from the week of online deals in promotion of yesterday’s Cyber Monday, which was forecasted to be the biggest online shopping day of the year. It is still too early to tell if this decrease is the beginning of a decline in physical bargain hunting to make way for the Internet age.
