Guns are the big news coming out of Black Friday. The FBI reports that it ran a record 185,345 background checks—federally mandated for buyers of new guns at licensed gun shops—on Black Friday 2015. That equates to about two background checks per second, and it’s making all the headlines coming out of brick-and-mortar retail’s biggest day of the year. Surely the media attention given this new record is due in part to the same attention given to recent gun crime. In addition to that, it’s a testament to a good news/bad news scenario for general retailers.
Bad news: physical retail sales are down. As in-store retail sales go, it’s bad news. Dig a little deeper into the Black Friday headlines and you’ll find the stats coming out of Shoppertrak; In-store sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday are shaping up to total around $12.1 billion, a steep drop from last year’s $13.6 billion.
Good news: mobile sales are up. On a brighter note, estimates from Adobe Index, which tracks spending at the top 100 retailers in the nation, show promise that digital will save the day. According to the Index, retailers were expected to tally digital sales of $3 billion on Monday, up 12 percent from last year. Smartphones are apparently supporting much of that growth, accounting for 44 percent of all online traffic over the busy shopping weekend and driving 19 percent of online sales, according to IBM Watson Trend. For perspective, that’s a 65 percent increase over the sale volume driven by smartphones during the same period last year. What’s more, smartphones were credited with driving more sales than tablets for the first time ever.
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