Holiday Sales Early Indicators

• The amount of money that consumers spent over the Thanksgiving weekend is estimated to have slipped 2.7% to $57.4B, the National Retail Federation says.
• The drop is in contrast to estimates that Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales at brick-and-mortar stores rose 2.3%.
• The average consumer spent $407.02 over the whole weekend, down 3.9% from last year.
• The number of shoppers increased to 141M people from 139M.
• The fall in spending came after retailers warned of a difficult holiday season and was due to the aggressive bargains on offer, a trend that is expected to continue.
• However, the NRF maintained its forecast that retail sales will grow 3.9% for the whole holiday whole season.
• Online sales climbed 17.3% on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, ComScore estimates, noting that the latter day attracted a record $1.2B in spending. The research firm expects Internet sales to rise 16% for the whole of the holiday season.
• The most visited sites on Black Friday were those of Amazon (AMZN), eBay (EBAY) Walmart (WMT), Best Buy (BBY) and Target (TGT).
• Total e-commerce sales hit $20.6B in the first 29 days of this holiday season, up 3.1% from last year, although this year includes more days.
• Today is Cyber Monday, which the NRF reckons will attract 131M shoppers vs 129M last year. But as with Black Friday, Cyber Monday has started a day early, with J.C. Penney (JCP) and Macy's (M) among those who began related promotions yesterday. Target has gone further and created "Cyber Week."