Black Friday spending in U.S. stores leads as Americans spend more online

By Ananya Mariam Rajesh and Bianca Flowers

(Reuters) – Black Friday spending at U.S. retail stores was muted this year, in contrast to a stronger surge online, as bargain-hungry Americans abandoned stores in favor of their phones and computers laptops, according to data from Mastercard and other data providers.

Sales at physical stores rose just 0.7% year-on-year, according to preliminary estimates from payment processor Mastercard, and were lower according to data firm Facteus.

Still, U.S. e-commerce sales grew 14.6% online, according to Mastercard SendingPulse, a metric measuring U.S. retail sales on the Mastercard payment network, combined with estimates for payments in cash and by check.

Estimates are not adjusted for inflation. “If you add inflation, in-store spending is even lower,” said Jonathan Chin, co-founder and chief data officer at Facteus. The company looked at debit and credit card spending habits online and in stores on a seven-day rolling basis, year over year.

Facteus said online sales rose 11.1% and in-store sales fell 5.4%. With inflation, those numbers drop to 8.5% growth online and 8% decline in-store.

Michelle Meyer, chief economist at the Mastercard Economics Institute, noted that even though overall inflation is running at over 2%, popular holiday-related purchases, such as appliances, clothing, sporting goods, personal care products and jewelry, saw their prices drop. , or modest increase, over the past year.

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving in the United States, kicked off the holiday shopping season for retailers. Competition has intensified to lure shoppers looking for discounts, like 58-year-old Corey Coscioni.

Coscioni searched for bargains online and in Chicago-area stores Friday, looking for “gifts for everyone: my wife, my daughter and myself.” Its stops included Bloomingdales, Macys and Anthropologie. While we were waiting in line, I would go shopping.

MUTE SALES

Leading up to Black Friday, many shoppers visited stores to browse products and learn about available products and prices. “They were waiting,” said Meyer, the Mastercard economist. “But then when the Black Friday sales started, we had this big concentration of spending, which was actually happening online, given that that's where you have the most power and choice as a consumer.”

Department store chains such as Macy's and Kohl's, as well as big-box retailer Target, could see moderate sales this season, which is shorter with just 26 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

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Sales at Best Buy and Target on Friday were relatively flat year over year, according to Facteus.

Massive purchases by U.S. shoppers online from mobile phones, laptops, desktops and other devices have potentially favored e-commerce giants such as Amazon.com and Walmart. Walmart, which operates 4,700 stores in the United States, has invested heavily in home delivery for its online shoppers.

E-commerce retailers including Shein, PDD's Temu and TikTok Shop of Beijing-based social media platform ByteDances TikTok also posted strong sales growth in the seven days to Friday, compared with a year earlier. earlier, Facteus said.

Overall spending on Friday was up 3.4% year over year, according to Mastercard SendingPulse, which excludes auto sales and is not adjusted for inflation. From November 1 to December 24, in-store and online spending is expected to increase by 3.2% year-on-year, according to its initial estimates.

A Saturday tally by Adobe Inc showed Americans spent about $10.8 billion online on Friday, up 10.2% from a year earlier. Makeup, Bluetooth speakers and espresso machines were the best sellers, according to the release. Adobe tracks devices that use its software to generate more than 1 trillion visits to retail sites in the United States.

Separately, Salesforce, a cloud-based software company that tracks a wide range of spending categories, said U.S. online sales rose 7% on Friday to $17.5 billion. Shoppers purchased more appliances and furniture online, according to Salesforce, which said it analyzed the activity of more than 1.5 billion buyers worldwide.

(Reporting by Ananya Mariam Rajesh in Bengaluru and Bianca Flowers in Chicago; editing by Alexander Smith, Diane Craft, Nick Zieminski and Deepa Babington)

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