Black Friday sales fall 10% from a year ago

The relative calm that accompanied Black Friday shopping in the United States and Britain this year belied a frenzy for deals as hordes of Christmas shoppers skipped visits to brick-and-mortar stores to shop online over their computers and mobile phones. We didn’t start shopping until today. Greg was live at Belmar in Lakewood and Amanda at the Southlands in Aurora. “Our Black Friday occasion was unfathomably prominent a year ago so to guarantee partners have enough time to set up for the occasion this year, we will be shutting every store participating in Black Friday at 12am and reviving them at 5am”, a representative said.

Shopper Eruain Nieto (cq) sits on the edge of a plant pot while waiting for his daughter, who shops at the H&M store at NorthPark Center in Dallas on Black Friday. But the masses who do shop the holiday appear to have made for a muted Black Friday. Online sales jumped 14.3 percent on Friday compared with past year, according to Adobe, which tracked activity on 4,500 retail websites.

America’s annual shopping extravaganza Black Friday did not have the fireworks of past years.

Retailers, in turn, are scrambling to offer sales earlier each year, both in stores and online.

Cowen analyst Oliver Chen estimates that while online traffic during Black Friday weekend will rise 20% vs. a year earlier, in-store traffic will fall 2% to 4%.

Walmart said it had sold so many movies that it would take close to 3,000 years to watch all of them; many of its sales were online. All of the rules and details are listed on page 19 of Best Buy’s Black Friday ad. Target said Friday in a statement that it had a “strong turnout” in stores on Thanksgiving, without providing specific figures. Nomura Securities International retail analyst, Bob Drbul said, “From the perspective of the amount of discounting that’s going on, the over-inventory situation, it seems like there are going to be a lot of great deals in the next 45 days”. Retailers can’t dismiss it, they still have to have a Black Friday strategy and many still do.

In retail store news, Target issued a release in which it said that Apple iPads were top sellers in in its stores and online. International Business Machines Corp.’s (NYSE:IBM) Watson highlights that online sales on this Thanksgiving have surged by 26% compared to the same festive occasion of the previous year.

According to the National Retail Federation, the nation’s largest retail trade group, almost 60 percent of shoppers had already started holiday buying by November 10. Now, many stores offer several hundred doorbusters, and numerous items don’t carry a name brand.