If you’re a Black Friday shopper who likes to physically go out and grab all the deals you can, you may have noticed something a little different this year — the number of people. Foot traffic to retail stores fell on Black Friday this year, while online sales broke records.
Visits by shoppers to physical stores were down 1.7 percent from 2017 on Black Friday, and 1 percent for both Black Friday and Thanksgiving Day shopping, CNBC reported. The data was cited from ShopperTrak, which found that while foot traffic for Black Friday fell, shoppers spent $6.22 billion online, up from 23.6 percent last year.
“We know that online sales … has certainly eroded traffic from retailers over the years,” Brian Field, senior director of advisory services for ShopperTrak, told CNBC. “But what we have noticed is that the decline is starting to flatten out.”
Field also said he noticed heavier traffic on Thanksgiving Day in particular.
“There was a huge amount of traffic on Thanksgiving Day, but in a very concentrated time frame,” he said. “It’s from when that store opens until basically all of those hot commodity items are gone. … Then it really calms down.”
The ease of shopping from a computer at home or from a mobile phone has enticed more shoppers to skip the hassle of going out to a store, fighting with other customers and buy online instead.
By: Maytinee Kramer
