The Best Times To Shop On Black Friday, According To Google

While some shoppers may be looking for toys, most employees say they are looking at TV’s.

IBM does not report total sales figures, but Adobe said Friday evening that Americans were on pace to spend more than $2.7 billion online Friday. The e-commerce behemoth has been luring shoppers with its free, two-day shipping membership program and an increased focus on fashion that’s challenging even industry stalwarts like Macy’s, Drbul said. Cyber Monday, associated with shoppers keen to pick up discounted technology ranging from smartphones to laptops and PCs, is one of the busiest points leading up to Christmas for the general public to pick up their new gadgets.

Shoppers have options to hit stores before and after Thanksgiving dinner, overnight into Black Friday morning and throughout the weekend, so the flow of customers into stores is becoming more spread out and less frenetic.

Jessica Locke, 38, of Hollis, brought her daughter and a friend to Target but said they weren’t compelled by any desire to nab a particular door-buster deal.

Shares of Target Corp (TGT.N) gained 0.4 percent, but J.C. Penney (JCP.N) wad down 0.7 percent, and Macy’s and Best Buy lost about 1 percent. But it’s expected that more than three times the number of people who shopped on Thanksgiving will venture out to shop on the day after the holiday known as Black Friday.

Called Black Friday, but now actually beginning up to a week before Thanksgiving, when brick-and-mortar and online retailers begin boasting seasonal sales, the day after the nation’s day of thanks has always been seen as the official start to the holiday gift shopping season.

“I started at Toys R Us at 3 a.m. and then I went to JCPenney and then I came here to the mall”.

As much as 20 per cent of holiday shopping is expected to be done over the Thanksgiving weekend this year, analysts said.

“This is very exciting”, Franziska Reiter, of Hamburg, Germany, said, as she partook in her first Black Friday event in the USA. This year is the 10th anniversary of Cyber Monday, which was coined by the National Retail Federation to create yet another promotional shopping holiday.

“We believe Thanksgiving shopping was a bust”, analysts at Sun Trust Robinson Humphrey said in a research note. “We weren’t standing in line today”, she said.

The group estimated that overall sales for November and December would rise 3.7 percent to $630.5 billion compared with a year ago.

You won’t find a more organized shopper than Connie.

But the predicted chaos on the high street failed to materialise, with shopper traffic down by 4.05% on previous year, according to retail experts FootFall.