The past few years has seen Black Friday creep into Thanksgiving Day – with some stores now opening for shopping at 3 pm. And while some shoppers don’t mind moving their turkey dinner to noon in order to go out and score some deals on HDTVs and printers, less people went out this year on Thanksgiving than last year.
The LA Times reports that in-store visits dropped 1% over the two days of Thanksgiving and Black Friday, with all of the decline coming from less people on Thursday.
“We found that Thanksgiving Day store openings were increasingly pulling shopper visits from Black Friday over the past few years,” said Brian Field, senior director of advisory services for ShopperTrak told the Times. “This year, we saw a reversal of that trend, which can be attributed to several factors including fewer store openings on Thanksgiving Day, as well as online shopping.”
This year 109 million people shopped online, while 99 million went out to stores – probably because you can shop online from your house, without making someone miss dinner with their family to work a shift at Target to ring up your order, and, perhaps best of all, you don’t even have to wear pants while you do it.
Hopefully, this signals the beginning of the end for stores opening on Thursday for shopping and we can all #MakeThanksgivingGreatAgain.
