This holiday season has been extremely disappointing in terms of store sales. Both Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales were lackluster, and there has been a considerable lack of continuing momentum. In fact, for chain stores, store sales have been down 6.3% over the past week.
It is very difficult to find any strong performing stores this holiday season. The only prominent establishments that did manage to increase their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales over last year were Best Buy and Amazon. While it’s possible that more sales occurred prior to Black Friday, most signs suggest that this was a very weak holiday season.
Even the past year has been underwhelming, as the year gains for chain stores has been just a mere 1.7%. Additionally, the seasonally adjusted sales at brick and mortar chain stores have been down 70% from last year. It will be virtually impossible for retailers to put any sort of positive spin on these reports.
Needless to say, there were many very big losers this Black Friday.
Sears and Kmart waited until 6am on Black Friday to open their doors, bucking the recent trend of opening on Thanksgiving night. This was a critical mistake, as reports have indicated that Kmart stores were virtually dead on Black Friday. One market analyst said that her local Kmart was “alarmingly absent of customers”.
While the Windows 10 Tablets from Microsoft were supposed to be a hot ticket item, they instead sold very poorly. The Windows 10 Tablets simply could not keep up with the sales of the iPad Mini and the iPad Air from Apple and the Kindle Fire from Amazon. Needless to say, Microsoft has a large amount of ground to make up in the tablet department.
It’s fair to wonder if Black Friday can ever regain the large amount of hype that it once held. With retailers seemingly content to spread out the savings across a longer period of time, there might never be another sale period as prominent as the old-fashioned Black Friday. At the rate things are going, it might not be long before the “holiday” disappears entirely.
Stay Connected
