The economy has lead to a lot of anxiety among retailers about how their sales will be during the holidays, and that of course includes craft & scrapbooking retailers. The holiday season accounts for a significant portion of the years’ sales for most retailers.
Black Friday kicks off the holiday season and is usually the single biggest shopping day of the year. It doesn’t necessarily indicate definitively how the shopping season will be, but consumer behavior on Thanksgiving weekend can definitely provide some important clues to how the season will go.
Black Friday Sales Surprisingly Not A Disaster
Preliminary reports are starting to come in about how retailers did on Black Friday. Initial reports from ShopperTrak RCT’s National Retail Sales Estimate today are that sales were up about 3%, but the research group qualified that positive sounding number by saying that adjusted for inflation sales were actually flat compared to last year. Sales were up in all four regions of the country. They were up the least in the Northeast (2.6%) and up the most in the South (3.4%).
These Black Friday results were weak compared to 2007, which was up 8% over 2006, but not as disastrous as was feared for retailers. It appears consumers responded to the heavy discounting offered by retailers. What is unknown, of course, is whether this spending will continue or if consumers are mostly done with their holiday shopping.
But Your Local Mileage (Sales) May Vary
These positive numbers are of course averages and may not correspond to all areas. Anecdotally, despite media reports in other areas of good shopper turnout, I can report from our county that stores Friday morning were relatively deserted. I’m used to encountering crowds in my local Staples that were 2-3 times bigger at the store’s opening time than I encountered Friday. Target, an hour after open, was less busy than on a usual Saturday. That time of morning on Black Friday the Target I used to go to (before the one in our town opened this summer) would be 5 shoppers deep in line with every register open. This year at my new Target, only about a third of the registers were staffed and most of the register staff were actually standing in the aisle looking for customers that might need help! But our county has a local unemployment rate of 10% due to its dependence on the construction industry. When we traveled 35 miles south, to Daytona Beach, where the local economy is much more diverse, the stores seemed much busier.
Did Small Stores Fare As Well As Big Stores?
Of course, just because people were spending money, that doesn’t necessarily help small stores like scrapbook retailers. It depends on where they were spending their money, and on what. If they were only visiting Best Buy and Walmart for cheap consumer electronics, the craft stores and manufacturers don’t benefit.
CNN.com has a story up that seems to indicate that people spent their Black Friday money mostly on the deeply discounted sales at the big box stores, and not at small retailers. MSNBC is reporting that shoppers were spending less and that purchases tended toward more practical items like clothing and household items than usual. None of that is good news for scrapbook retailers this season.
What About Cyber Monday?
The Monday after Thanksgiving, when employees return to work and shop via computer from their desks, has come to be called “Cyber Monday” in the world of online retailing. As consumers have gotten more comfortable with online shopping in recent years, Cyber Monday has seen massive growth in sales. This year however, it will probably take the economic hit that Black Friday took.
CNNMoney is predicting flat sales on Cyber Monday despite heavy discounting by online retailers. Online behemoth Amazon is forecasting they will be the exception to that rule, telling CNBC that they expect 12-15% growth in sales. (By contrast 2007 was up 42% over 2006.)
Both the CNN article and a similar article on CNBC about Cyber Monday expectations make a point that is relevant to online scrapbook retailers: online consumers have come to expect free shipping. The CNBC article put it this way:
Free shipping used to be the big promo Web shops used to lure shoppers — especially at this point in the season. But consumers have come to expect free shipping online and this year, it’s going to take a lot more to get rattled shoppers to pry open their purses.
What do you think?
So how was traffic/sales at your store or where you went shopping on Black Friday? What are your plans for Cyber Monday? Use the comments to share your stories!
About Nancy Nally
I have an additional theory on why the stores were not as busy this year. The sales were not as good! Normally I am easily tempted by deeply discounted items. It seems to me that the discounts were not as deep. For instance, every year I’ve been out before, AC Moore had a 60% off coupon. This year, they only had 50%. Heck, you can get a 50% off coupon from AC Moore on very regular basis – it seems like they have one every Tuesday. They also had a 30% off entire purchase coupon, but they have Moonlight Madness all the time for 25%. Is 5% really worth waking up at 6 am and fighting huge crowds? I don’t think so. AC Moore is an example, but others were similar. I was in the market for a good printer and many electronic stores didn’t have any on sale at all. I bought my HP laptop at Staples last year for $350. This year’s discounted laptop was $350, but it was a tiny little Acer that my fingers got cramped just looking at. It seems like retailers are struggling so much, that they’ve been offering us deeper discounts than usual for months now – perhaps they just can’t afford to go any lower now.