#WackFriday

The National Federation of Retailers is out with some bad news about Black Friday – it sucked.

Some superlatives via WSJ:

“Shoppers spent an average $159.55 online, down 10.2% from $177.67 last year.”

and…

“the number of people who went shopping over the four-day weekend declined by 5.2% to 134 million, from 141 million last year.”

and…

“Total spending from Thursday through Sunday sank 11% from a year earlier to $50.9 billion”

The excuses you’ll hear will range from the warm weather in the Northeast to the protests to the late scheduling of Hanukkah this year to the whole “consumers are smart enough to wait til closer to Christmas”.

My own take is that online is going to be big all month long and traditional shopping patterns are null and void. There’s nothing important about Black Friday to most consumers anymore. They know the deals will be endless and often.