Most consumers haven’t bought their Thanksgiving turkey yet, but it’s already the holiday shopping season in the minds of many retailers.
Wal-Mart, Target and others are aggressively advertising holiday specials online and in stores to get a jump on the spending spree that remains a key contributor to merchants’ financial health.
Although Black Friday remains a big shopping day, its importance has been eroded by ever-earlier bargains, the growing clout of online shopping and retailers’ fear that the other guys are getting a jump on them. That competition anxiety was behind the push five years ago to open stores on Thanksgiving Day, and merchants are proving again this year that they can’t open their physical stores early enough to launch the season.
Wal-Mart, Kohl’s, Toys R Us and several others plan to open on Thanksgiving again this year — some even earlier than in 2016 — a move that in past seasons drew grumbling from some consumers and retail employees unhappy with retail’s “Christmas creep.”
Brick-and-mortar stores are expected to lose more ground this year to the convenience of shopping by phone or computer.
E-commerce has become so pervasive that U.S. online retail sales this holiday season are expected to reach $107.4 billion, a 13.8 percent jump from last year and the first time they’ll top the $100 billion mark, the research firm Adobe Analytics forecasts.
All together, U.S. holiday retail sales (those for November and December) should climb 3.6 percent to 4 percent this year, to as much as $682 billion, the National Retail Federation forecasts.
The economy is helping.
“The combination of job creation, improved wages, tame inflation and an increase in net worth all provide the capacity and the confidence (for consumers) to spend,” Jack Kleinhenz, the NRF’s chief economist, said in a statement.
And retailers are trying to cover every shopping preference and garner every possible sales dollar as they launch the holiday spending season, which can account for about 40 percent of a retailer’s annual revenue.
It would be a mistake to confuse the problems of the retailers’ physical stores — which partly reflects that too many were built to survive the shift to online — with the notion that Americans no longer care as much to step foot in stores for “doorbusters” and other deeply discounted goods, analysts said.
After all, if online shopping is all the rage, why bother opening stores on Thanksgiving Day?
Because “a website can’t give you goosebumps” like those experienced in touching, buying and taking home the electronics, apparel and other goods bought during the holidays, Barr said.
“Let’s say you and I both want to buy a TV on Thanksgiving Day,” he said. “You go online and it’s going to be delivered in two to three days. I go to the store, get my TV and I’m home in an hour and watching it. It’s an emotional interaction, and that’s what they’re appealing to on Thanksgiving Day.”
