Store sales, cyber-deals fight it out

We’ll be updating this list throughout the day so be sure to check back to this page all day Monday for more deals. A year ago, the nation’s largest retailer only offered a sneak peak of about 20 deals on the evening before Cyber Monday.

Cyber Mondayis the day the world goes online to buy stuff. It had been $380.95 in 2014’s Black Friday weekend and $407.02 the year before.

“You will see all these sales throughout November they call Black Friday sales but they’re not really Black Friday”.

By 2005, retail writer Ellen Davis, coined the term “Cyber Monday” to describe the coming together of two social phenomena – one traditional, one very new.

Another frustrated user tweeted: “shouldn’t advertise doing Black Friday if your website can’t handle it. Trying to pay and keeps crashing”.

But Black Friday, he continued, “is still the biggest sales day of the year and signals the start of the holiday shopping season”.

It’s still an important sales day, but a variety of factors are cutting into the day’s reputation as the day for the biggest discounts.

Of those who shopped in stores over the weekend, 72.8 percent – 74.2 million shoppers – said they shopped on Black Friday, the biggest day of the weekend; another 34.6 million (34 percent) said they shopped on Thanksgiving Day and 46.8 million (45.9 percent) shopped on Saturday, the NRF says.

But sometimes retailers lose when customers go online.

As in the U.S., the bargains tend to be more driven to kitchen gadgets and electrical appliances than gifts.

The industry group’s poll this year uses different methodology than last year, and it did not estimate total sales for the four-day weekend.

There were plenty of great deals worth coming out for and early reports for Black Friday sales showed a record number of people shopped online – and they used their phones to do it. The Logan Valley Mall opened on Thanksgiving for only six hours – but that brought some the most dedicated shoppers out to the mall.

With so many people shopping online, there was no repeat of the unseemly scuffles witnessed in high street stores previous year as customers fought over big-ticket items.

Christ Christopher, the director of consumer economics at IHS, told the Associated Press he expected online sales to jump more than 11.7% this year, equaling out to approximately $95 billion.

Price will be the major influence on purchases this year, as shoppers look to get more for their money, analysts said. Nearly equal numbers of shoppers visited physical stores and shopped online, it said.

Black Friday for decades was a rite of passage for USA shoppers.

Take Pia Tracy, who bought some items at Pier 1 home furnishings store over the weekend. “Consumers are seeing the shopping season as a zone”.