Thanksgiving, Black Friday Sales Bode Well

Good news, retailers! If breaking the $3 billion benchmark wasn’t indication enough, the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) found that the data from this year’s Black Friday, as well as Thanksgiving, bode well for the remainder of the holiday shopping season.

Here are some of the key other findings from the ICSC’s 2016 Thanksgiving/Black Friday Shopping Report.

The report found that over 75 percent of U.S. shoppers surveyed spent the same or more on purchases over last year. Consumers are estimated to have spent an average of $373 on Black Friday, including about $100 on dining and entertainment.

Omnichannel retailers were the big winners this year, as 89 percent of shoppers spent their holiday cash at stores with both a physical and an online presence.

In keeping with tradition, a majority of purchases were made in physical stores (80 percent), while 18 percent of consumer dollars went toward pure eCommerce. All in all, a whopping 57 percent of all adults in the U.S. visited stores on Thanksgiving and/or Black Friday, up from 51 percent in 2015.

Tom McGee, president and CEO of the ICSC, was quoted as saying, “While the holiday shopping season has lengthened and includes all of November and December, the Black Friday and Thanksgiving results are important and this year serve as a positive indicator for the holiday season.”

Intriguingly, this year’s Thanksgiving rush may have seen the bulk of foot traffic to physical stores, with crowds thinning out considerably by Black Friday morning as more consumers continued to move online for their holiday shopping splurges.

Regardless of where and how, the final tally of dollars spent on Black Friday speaks for itself. It would still seem as though this year’s holiday shopping season is still well-slated to reach the NRF’s projection of $655.8 billion total, including $117 billion in online sales.