Black Friday is done! Malls are empty! Brick-and-mortar is on the way out!
And the sky is falling, Chicken Little.
The holiday season has a way of bringing out the hyperbole in retail pundits and reporters alike.
Forbes turned to Bill Martin, founder of ShopperTrak, which measures store traffic in retail stores and mall common areas via 80,000 sensor devices installed globally, to separate fact from fiction on the make-or-break selling season.
Black Friday Is No Longer Important
Not so, says Martin.
‘What’s missing in all of this [analysis] is the psychological start of the holiday season,” he said. Indeed, Christmas creep has retailers ranging from Walmart to Amazon starting their holiday seasonal push earlier every year. Hence, buying is stretched out over a longer period, he said.
Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
And while retail sales fell 10.4% over the four day Black Friday weekend from 2014, according to ShopperTrak, that decline, once again, reflects shoppers hitting stores earlier in November, as well as calendar shifts, such as fewer available shopping hours this year on Thanksgiving Day, and a later Hanukkah, Martin said.
The four days still generated a projected $20.43 billion in brick-and-mortar retail sales — not exactly chump change for a sale-athon tradition that’s said to be on the way out.
The Web Is Hurting Brick-And-Mortar Holiday Sales
Due to shoppers “webrooming,” browsing online and then buying offline, in-store conversion rates — the percent of visitors who make a purchase — have improved across all merchandise sectors, driving higher brick-and-mortar retail sales, Martin said. That’s because shoppers who first research products online are more purposeful spenders once they get to the mall.
And despite all the talk that brick-and-mortar shopping is on the way out, ShopperTrak expects in-store holiday sales to reach record levels this year, estimating a $268.6 billion pot, up 2.4% from 2014.
It is true, however, that store visits are down. A decade ago, a consumer might browse Walmart, Target TGT +0.00%, Best Buy BBY +0.00% and Circuit City in search of the best price and value for a consumer electronics purchase. Today, the footwork often takes place online via a few clicks, so a search that once “created four store visits, would now be one,” Martin said.
Some Holiday Seasons Are Longer Than Others
Not true. The retail gift-giving season runs from Nov. 1 to Dec. 31. “It’s 61 days every year,” Martin said. What does change things a bit are calendar shifts, which can alter shopping patterns. For example, Two years ago Hanukkah began in November. This year it was Dec. 6, he said. And “this year Christmas is late in the week, Friday, putting Super Saturday, [the last Saturday before Christmas] far from Christmas.”