Boxing Day footfall in the UK is down 6% so far and shopping centres are seeing a decline that’s heading towards 20%. Online may be up but that causes its own problems. What’s to blame? Step forward Black Friday.
Well, that was a surprise wasn’t it? All those predictions of an online surge and physical store armageddon seem to have been wrong. As I said in a post yesterday, it’s clear Black Friday weekend is still evolving. That became even clearer after some more figures today.
OK, what actually happened late last week and at the weekend. Did we all shop ’til we dropped? Did we click like crazy causing websites to crash? Did we bristle with rage every time we heard the words Black Friday?
Was it a tale of weather woes at House of Fraser this Christmas? Not a bit of it. The department store chain that’s now owned by China’s Nanjing Cenbest had a grrrreat six-week Christmas trading period with comparable sales excluding VAT up 5.3%. OK, that didn’t match the 8% rise of a year ago but…
It wasn’t only UK retailers that had a tough Christmas. In the US, retail giant Macy’s has announced almost 5,000 job cuts and almost 40 store closures so it can make savings of around $400m after the holiday season was, well… miserable.
Are Black Friday and Cyber Monday really worth the effort? Let’s ask John Lewis. The department store operator’s latest figures suggest that maybe they are. How so? Well, it’s sales in the last seven days rose 4.8% year-on-year and – wait for the drum roll – 60.1% compared to the previous week. Cue fireworks, Christmas…
The intense focus on numbers at this time of year can be rather wearing, not to say confusing. Every day it seems we hear about percentage sales that have gone up or down and billions of dollars or pounds spent in stores, online or via smartphones. However, what matters as much as the numbers themselves…
John Lewis celebrated 150 years of successful trading last year. But that was nothing compared to the celebrations today as the company revealed its biggest trading day – ever – on Black Friday. Just think about it. In the roughly 35,000 days that John Lewis has traded on this planet – last Friday saw it…
Black Friday is now an online phenomenon on both sides of the Atlantic – it’s official. I’ve already analysed the move online at length in the UK but in the US, where Black Friday began (and where its existence makes a lot more sense), the migration to the web has taken some people by surprise…
It was all fairly inevitable. In the UK at least. Black Friday migrated more fully online than forecasters predicted. While many physical stores were underwhelmed by demand, websites crashed and customers were left frustrated.
TRENDWALK.net 