LITTLE ROCK — Thanksgiving shopping took a noticeable bite out of Black Friday’s start to the holiday season, as the latest survey found retail sales in stores fell slightly from last year.
Saturday’s report from retail technology company ShopperTrak found consumers spent $11.2 billion at stores across the U.S., down 1.8 percent from last year’s total.
This year’s Friday results appear to have been tempered by hundreds of thousands of shoppers hitting sales Thursday evening. Retailers including Sears, Target and Wal-Mart got their deals rolling as early as 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving.
Online shopping also may have cut into the take at physical stores: IBM said online sales rose 17.4 percent on Thanksgiving and 20.7 percent on Black Friday, compared with 2011.
Yet ShopperTrak said retail foot traffic increased 3.5 percent, to more than 307.67 million store visits, indicating at least some shoppers were browsing but not spending freely.
“Black Friday continues to be an important day in retail,” said ShopperTrak founder Bill Martin. “This year, though, more retailers than last year began their door buster deals on Thursday, Thanksgiving itself. So while foot traffic did increase on Friday, those Thursday deals attracted some of the spending that’s usually meant for Friday.”
The company estimated that shopper foot traffic rose the most in the Midwest, up 12.9 percent compared with last year. Traffic rose the least, 7.6 percent, in the Northeast, parts of which are still recovering from superstorm Sandy.
ShopperTrak, which counts foot traffic and its own proprietary sales numbers from 25,000 retail outlets across the U.S., had forecast Black Friday sales would grow 3.8 percent this year, to $11.4 billion.
While consumer confidence has been improving, many people are still worried about the slow economic recovery, high unemployment and whether a gridlocked Congress can avert tax increases and government spending cuts - the “fiscal cliff ” - set to occur automatically in January.
Online retailers worked as hard as physical stores to draw customers, sending each of their subscribers an average of 5.9 promotional emails during the seven days through Black Friday. That’s an all-time high, according to marketing software company Responsys.
Information for this article was contributed by Candice Choi and Sarah Skidmore of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 11/25/2012