“Retailers have adapted and enticed customers with a number of incentives throughout November. The Thanksgiving holiday weekend remains a significant time for friends and families to check specific holiday items off their lists,” said NRF president and chief executive officer Matthew Shay in a statement. “Over the last few years consumers have shifted their holiday shopping plans to start earlier in the season.”

As retailers continue to extend deals and other offers into October and early November, around half of shoppers said they took advantage of early holiday sales or promotions before Thanksgiving this year. Most weekend shoppers (82 per cent) felt the deals were the same or better than last Thanksgiving.

The number of people who shopped in stores increased this year. Retailers saw an increase in foot traffic, with approximately 104.9 million shoppers visiting stores, up from 92.3 million in 2020. The overall number of online shoppers decreased to a total of 127.8 million from 145.4 million last year.

Black Friday remained the most popular day for in-store shopping, with 66.5 million shoppers, followed by 51 million shoppers on Small Business Saturday. The importance of supporting local businesses remained top of mind for many consumers, with 71 percent indicating they were shopping specifically for Small Business Saturday.

Similar to recent years, Black Friday surpassed Cyber Monday in terms of total online shoppers, with 88 million shopping online the Friday after Thanksgiving compared with 77 million on Monday.

Top gift purchases over the weekend included clothing and accessories (bought by 51 per cent of those surveyed), toys (32 per cent), gift cards/certificates (28 per cent), books/music/movies/video games (27 per cent) and electronics (24 per cent).

NRF defines the holiday season as November 1 through December 31 and has forecast that sales will grow between 8.5 percent and 10.5 percent over 2020 to between $843.4 billion and $859 billion.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (DS)