We received our first Black Friday report this morning from Florida where Best Buy was doing business as usual. Our spy went to the store at 4am and found no crowds or pushing. In a considerably sadder situation, a worker at a Long Island Wal-Mart was crushed and a woman miscarried. Holy crap, right?
That said, tell us what you saw today in your travels. Email us at tips@cg or drop a note in comments. I’ll go first: Today is my son’s birthday party and we found the little party supply store down the street to be completely empty. We were able to buy our balloons unscathed.
Black Friday – A Great Start, But Show Me the Money!
With a combination of deep discounts, “two-fer” sales and early bird specials, retailers did better than expected—at least that’s according to the National Retail Federation (NRF). The NRF reports that more than 172 million shoppers hit stores and websites between Thanksgiving Thursday and Sunday, which is 25 million more than shopped last year. They are also reporting that shoppers spent an average of $372.57, up 7.2 percent over last year’s $347.55 for an estimated total expenditure of $41.0 billion.
While it’s still way too early to draw any real conclusions, they predict a 2.2 percent increase, or about $470 billion, in total holiday sales. Well, that all sounds rosy, but bear in mind that the NRF is a retailer’s trade association. That means they are the Cheerleaders of Shopping. And what is a cheerleader’s job? It’s to pump you up. Naturally they want to couch things in the best of terms possible even before anybody knows what the actual numbers are. Remember the mantra of herd mentality: if everyone else is doing it, it must be OK.
Since two-thirds of our economy is based on the spending of the U.S. consumers, without consumer spending it’s going to be hard for the economy to get much traction. But a strong opening weekend does not automatically translate into a strong holiday season for retail. After all, shoppers were looking for the deepest possible discounts this year, given the state of the economy, so a majority of the sales went to discount and mall-based retailers like WalMart. It’s hard to say how this flurry of activity will translate into profits. I suspect retailer’s gross margins are going to suffer after adding in expenditures before arriving at their actual operating income.
The NRF stats, which were picked up by most major news outlets, are superficial and preliminary data at best, and we’ll get another spat of stats once the “Cyber Monday” online shopping sites release their numbers. But the more levelheaded analysts are saying that the surge in traffic and sales is unlikely to last through the holiday shopping season. The rest of the market seemed to agree because on the first day of December the DOW plummeted nearly 700 points on the same consumer spending concerns.
The NRF data also showed traffic had trailed off Saturday and Sunday after a strong Friday and that traffic and sales over the next several weeks will likely moderate after a higher percentage of shoppers, 39.3% versus 36.4% last year, said they’d completed their holiday shopping.
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In my opinion, the short-term spike in sales and the release of promising numbers is just “vanity,” and that will never replace “sanity,” which is what the retailers and the markets need because it’s the actual profits that set the true price of equities in the marketplace.
So let’s hold our horses. I am cautiously optimistic and will remain so until the retailers “show me the money!” And they won’t be able to do that until they release their next quarterly earnings report.