The pandemic has not just changed consumer habits. It also led American retailers to rethink Black Friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year.
Many stores remained closed on Thanksgiving Day last Thursday, in a break with the pre-coronavirus tradition of opening on holiday night.
Retailers backed away from heavily discounted items available for a limited time that drew hordes of shoppers into stores on Friday morning. Instead, they’ve been trading Black Friday deals all month, both online and in stores. Some hosted streaming events on their websites on Friday as an alternative to visiting a store.
“Customers are buying differently this year,” said Greg Revelle, director of marketing for Kohl’s Corp. “We had to change our Black Friday strategy.”
Stores are trying to balance what economists predict will be a year-end sales record with supply chain constraints that have kept some items out of stock.
Americans on Black Friday spent $6.6 billion online as of 11 pm EDT on Thursday, according to Adobe Inc. Adobe estimates that by the time the final count arrives, consumers will have mobilized between $8, 8 billion and $9.2 billion online, compared with $9.03 billion a year ago.
Many consumers managed to save money during the pandemic and are now spending freely despite rising inflation. That bodes well for the holiday season, executives and analysts said.
The US National Retail Federation expects sales during November and December to increase by a record between 8.5% and 10.5% to $859 billion, compared with a year earlier. This contrasts with an average increase of 4.4% over the past five years.
The prediction came before the World Health Organization declared on Friday that a new strain of coronavirus, first detected in southern Africa, was a global “concern variant”. The variant has raised concerns that travel restrictions and other restrictions would hamper global economic recovery.
The trade group predicts that nearly 2 million more people, or a total of 158.3 million, will shop this year’s Thanksgiving weekend, compared with last year. Still, it’s down from the 165.3 million people who shopped the same weekend in 2019, before the pandemic.
source: Estadão Content
Reference: CNN Brasil
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