Retailers’ Thanksgiving deals cut Black Friday morning crowd

Thanksgiving Day openings and midnight deals at retailers from Target Corp. to Wal-Mart Stores Inc. drew U.S. shoppers out earlier than ever, thinning crowds on Black Friday morning.

Mall traffic was heaviest from midnight to 2 a.m. and weakened later in the morning, Adrienne Tennant, an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC in Washington, said today (Nov. 23) in a note. Sales for the rest of the weekend will top last year, she said.

Retailers have turned Black Friday, once a one-day event after Thanksgiving, into a week’s worth of deals and discounts. With the earlier openings, online deals starting as far back as last weekend and new promotions stores are offering to win return visits, shopping malls were less hectic on Black Friday this year, said Ramesh Swamy, an analyst at Deloitte LLP.

“Retailers are going to pace themselves and start rolling out different types of promotions to keep consumers interested,” Swamy said.

Shoppers visiting stores this weekend are getting coupons that can be used starting next week or after Dec. 1 to lure them back, he said.

With consumers facing a sluggish economy and the threat of tax increases that may result if Washington doesn’t avert the so-called fiscal cliff, this weekend will serve as a barometer of what’s to come for retailers in the next five weeks. One early sign is that online sales rose 21% yesterday and 17% on Thanksgiving, according to IBM Benchmark.

The National Retail Federation says holiday sales, including online, will rise 4.1% to about $586.1 billion this year, compared with a 5.6% gain in 2011. Online sales expected to gain 12% to $96 billion this year, three times as fast as total sales.

One reason may be that retailers have been putting many of their deals on the Web first. Target offered the same discounts it normally would reserve for stores on its website on Nov. 21. Staples Inc. posted what it called pre-Black Friday deals online on Nov. 18.

Mobile shopping also continued to gain popularity. EBay Inc.’s PayPal said the number of customers shopping through their tablets or smartphones more than doubled on Thanksgiving from last year. IBM said 24% of consumers used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 9.8% last year.

Wal-Mart, which offered two-day online-only Black Friday specials, said traffic through its mobile apps tripled and that mobile accounted for 45% of all Walmart.com traffic on Thanksgiving.

“This is the year that mobile finally went mainstream,” said Anuj Nayar, a PayPal spokesman. Many people finished Thanksgiving meals and then shopped on their tablets or phones, he said.

Forever 21 Inc., the closely held fast-fashion retailer, earlier this month introduced a revamped version of its mobile application that includes a barcode-scanning feature.
Shoppers can scan merchandise in stores to add items to an online wish-list, select different colors and sizes or show friends what they’re browsing, as the company looks to “blur the boundaries between in-store and online shopping,” Linda Chang, global marketing director, said in an e-mail.

Retailers also continued the trend of ever-earlier openings. Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us Inc. opened at 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving, while Target pushed its openings to 9 p.m. to draw more families.

“Earlier is more convenient to get out after the Thanksgiving dinners,” said Bryan Everett, senior vice president of Target stores. The greater number of families boosted purchases of clothes and home goods too as shoppers spent longer browsing than a year ago, he said.

Retailers also had increasingly confident consumers visiting stores this weekend. More Americans this month said the U.S. economy will improve than any time in the past decade, according to the Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index. The share of households saying it would get better rose to 37%, the highest since March 2002. A year ago, the measure showed a record number of consumers said it was a bad time to spend.

A rebound in housing and the job market, along with a drop in household debt, has led additional consumers to say they’ll buy more this holiday, according to a survey this month by the Credit Union National Association and the Consumer Federation of America. Of those polled, 12% said they would boost spending, the highest level since 15% in 2007.

Still, the survey reported 38% said they would spend less.

Holiday sales may also get a boost from there being 32 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year compared with 30 in 2011, Jennifer Davis, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets in New York, wrote in a note.

“Because of the extra weekend versus last year, we’re going to have a true Super Saturday,” said Deloitte’s Swamy, referring to the Saturday before Christmas which vies with Black Friday as the busiest shopping day of the year.

Weather may help gains too as colder temperatures increase sales of sweaters, boots, scarves, gloves and jackets, according to weather-data provider Planalytics Inc. Last year’s Black Friday was the warmest in five years, the Berwyn, Pa.- based firm said in an e-mail.