Black Friday Sales Slip as Discounts Start Earlier

Even as more stores opened their doors on Thanksgiving, hoping for a jump start to the holiday season, an initial reading suggested that combined sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday fell 0.5 percent from the same period last year.

ShopperTrak, a consumer analytics firm based in Chicago, warned that its estimates were preliminary, and that shifting spending patterns meant that holiday sales were now dispersed over a longer period. Retailers have been offering deep discounts well before their sales on Friday, and many stores moved the start of those sales to Thursday evening.

Still, initial weak numbers from what is seen as a critical year-end shopping spree revives concerns among retailers that despite a brightening economic outlook and lower gas prices, consumers remain wary to spend.

'You can try to get the consumer to spend earlier. But that doesn't mean there's more money in their pockets,' said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at the NPD Group, a market research company.

Brick-and-mortar stores also face a shift as much of the holiday spending happens online. A separate survey by IBM showed that those sales jumped, as more people shopped on smartphones and tablets than ever before.

One positive sign, Mr. Cohen said, was that surveys indicated that many consumers appeared to be buying for themselves. That suggests that there is still ample gift-buying coming later in the year, he said.

He also said that retailers had become better at integrating their brick-and-mortar stores with their online operations, offering the same deals on the web and in-store, for example, or giving customers the option of shopping online and picking up their purchases at a nearby store.

In the immediate term, retailers needed to brace for a lull after Black Friday, as exhausted consumers gave shopping a rest, Mr. Cohen said. And he warned of thinning margins at retailers that discounted too heavily in a bid to bolster traffic.

'Some were offering 50 percent off the entire store,' he said. 'You can't make money that way.'

The earlier start to Black Friday sales appeared to move consumers' shopping sprees forward. While traffic on Thanksgiving Day increased 27.3 percent, traffic on Friday fell 5.6 percent, according to ShopperTrak.

Bill Martin, the founder of ShopperTrak, suggested that the figures showed that consumers were simply waiting until later in the season to do the bulk of their holiday shopping. Last year, he said, Black Friday weekend sales rose 1 percent from the previous year, though sales for the entire season ultimately logged a gain of 3.1 percent.

'There is a significant amount of energy left in the consumer,' he said in a news release. And there are more big shopping days left, he said. That includes the final Saturday before Christmas, typically the biggest shopping day of the year.

According to estimates released by IBM, which tracks sales at 800 retail sites in the United States, online sales on Thanksgiving Day increased 14.3 percent, while sales on Black Friday were up 9.5 percent. Sales from mobile devices jumped over 25 percent on both days, the company said. People logging onto shopping sites from their smartphones or tablets accounted for over half of all online traffic on Thursday, and almost half of traffic on Friday, IBM said.

Just four years ago, less than 10 percent of the traffic came from mobile, said Jay Henderson, director of IBM Smarter Commerce.

'It's amazing just how pervasive mobile has become,' Mr. Henderson said. 'People are bringing their tablets to the dinner table as they finish up their pie,' he said. 'It's a new Thanksgiving tradition.'

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