Online sales roar in, but stores still in the race

“Last night was clearly the kickoff to Thanksgiving shopping and we saw it, not just with the lines, but with purchasing”, CEO Terry Lundgren said.

Black Friday is no day for Sunday drivers. Overall, the group predicts that 135.8 million people will shop during the long Thanksgiving weekend, versus the 133.7 million who did so in 2014.

“Black Friday weekend doesn’t matter to me anymore”, Tracy said. It expects its revenue in the current quarter to rise as much as 20% to $36 billion, compared to the same quarter past year.

“It’s actually helped a lot from a stores perspective, we are able to balance our work load differently but also still be there for our guests along their times”, Miller said.

His son Aidan said, “It’s just kind of a wonderful day where I just get to like basically shop and on Christmas morning you see everyone opening their presents and having their great faces and that makes me feel pretty good”.

It’s a tradition in many families, Michelle Reese added.

The popularity of online shopping did not appear to be matched on the high street and in supermarkets where there were no signs of the huge crowds which gathered on Black Friday previous year, or the scuffles which broke out as customers fought over big-ticket items.

“Our team loves this day and this weekend it’s one of what we call “Super Bowl” for the store”, Miller said.

But certain retailers made a point of bucking the Black Friday hoopla. About 15,000 people clamored to get inside the Macy’s Herald Square location in NY when its doors opened at 6 p.m. Thursday, which is about the same as previous year.

It’s no surprise that online and mobile sales are seeing the biggest projections for growth in the retail industry. On Thanksgiving, consumers are increasingly opting to shop from home.

Shoppers spent more than Dollars 1.7 billion on online purchases on Thursday, which showed an increase of 25 percent from the same period of time past year, beating market prediction of an 18 percent increase, Xinhua cited an Adobe Digital Index (ADI) report as saying on Friday. Its best sellers were televisions, game consoles and movies and toys generated by Star Wars. Online sales jumped 14.3 percent on Friday compared with previous year, according to Adobe, which tracked activity on 4,500 retail websites. The retailer said it sold an iPad every second throughout the day on Thanksgiving.