Black Friday

How did US retailers do on Black Friday? The holiday season is apparently off to a rather decent start, especially if one is more of an e-commerce retailer and less of a brick-and-mortar retailer. This is a shift in consumer behavior that has now been many years in the making and only appears to be accelerating.

According to sales data and estimates provided by Mastercard (MA), sales at physical retail locations experienced year over year Black Friday growth of just 0.7%, while Mastercard's SpendingPulse service showed e-commerce sales for the day up a whopping 14.6% year over year. Those headline numbers were not adjusted for inflation. Facteus, which is also a transaction data tracking service, showed online sales up 11.1% from the year ago comparison, while physical sales were actually down 5.4%. That's right, down. In real terms, meaning once adjusted for inflation, the Facteus numbers show online sales growth of 8.5% and physical retail sales that contracted a tough to look at 8%.

Those e-commerce sales in dollar terms, according to Adobe (ADBE) Analytics, reached $10.8B, which would be good for year over year growth of 10.2%. Three tracking services, three different numbers? Hmmm... Get used to it. ADP or the Bureau of Labor Statistics measure monthly job creation quite differently. The EIA and API try to measure weekly oil inventories and come to very different conclusions. Sticking with Adobe Analytics, between 10am and 2pm on Friday, US consumers, who executed 52.8% of their total Black Friday purchases online, averaged spending $11.3M per minute over those four hours. Globally, according to data provided by Salesforce (CRM), online Black Friday e-commerce was up 5% to $74.4B.

Does that mean that the rest of the world now celebrates Thanksgiving or a Thanksgiving-like holiday on the same day as the US? No, of course not. That said, it does mean that the rest of the world is learning to at least hunt for online discounts in line with the American calendar.

Before I leave this topic behind. According to Facteus, neither Best Buy (BBY) nor Target (TGT) saw much year over year growth in e-commerce sales this year, while Amazon (AMZN) and Walmart (WMT) apparently did quite well online.

I am long AMZN and WMT equity.