Black Friday online sales hit new high

Target Corp. and other brick-and-mortar chains are offering bigger discounts on this year’s Black Friday compared to last year’s. Throw in Cyber Monday and Small Business Saturday and you get a lot of this. But their big get was X-Box One. She’d gotten everything she wanted for the day. Perhaps Walmart will be using the live show to release really low-cost deals and shoppers will be given a an enough period of time to score the deal.

Among the shoppers was Mitchell resident Kim Powell who exited the store with a red shopping cart stacked with a number of finds, auto keys in the air trying to locate her vehicle. You didn’t need to. But it includes online spending and other non-store sales such as catalog spending.

“Probably 70 percent of our stuff is online”, said shopper Mark Foggiato.

In that same vein, Target plans to jump the Cyber Monday gun by offering discounts starting Sunday.

“I said it before and I will say it again, we will win the season on price – on Black Friday, on Cyber Monday and every day before and after”, said Bratspies.

It is the online equivalent to Black Friday – while the former is in stores and online – Cyber Monday is only available online.

It’s a dizzying array of choices trying to keep up with changing consumer shopping patterns. “There will be continuing dominance in online sales today as consumers increasingly realise they will get the same deals in-store and online”, said Brent Schoenbaum, a partner at Deloitte & Touche LLP. Now, the distinctions have lost all meaning.

In a first, online shopping on Black Friday is estimated to have hit the $3 billion mark in the U.S. with a major chunk of the total sales coming from mobile devices, a report said on Saturday.

The U.S. National Retail Federation surveyed consumers heading into the holiday season about their shopping plans and found that almost 102 million people plan to shop online or in stores on Friday.

Of the 151 million people that the National Retail Federation (NRF) says went shopping during Thanksgiving weekend previous year, those who did that weekend’s shopping online (103 million) outnumbered those who went to stores. When Target slashed prices last holiday season, its profit margin slipped to 27.9% from 28.5%. No one has to stick to the program. It will be hard to pay for all those online bargains if you end up on the unemployment line. There will be others online.

The challenge for traditional retailers is preventing consumers from becoming “locked in” at Amazon.

Retailers face many challenges, including internet shopping, parking charges and rates. A board game. A movie. In a few short years, it became tradition. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t find great deals on those highly sought after gadgets and toys if you waited until Friday. Even as retailers kick off the shopping season earlier each year, the day after Thanksgiving is still one of the busiest sales days of the year. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Retail Index has risen 4.9 percent so far in November and is on pace for its best monthly return since July.

With their own T-shirts, the Gatchel family racked 24 hours of shopping, and they were hardly alone in shopping early.