California Apparel News

Malls were buzzing with shoppers on Black Friday, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, but spending declined on the four day Thanksgiving Day weekend, according to a survey by prominent trade and advocacy group, National Retail Federation.

More than 141 million unique shoppers made purchases during the Black Friday weekend, up from 139 million during the same time in the last year, according to a Dec. 1 survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics on behalf of the NRF.

However Black Friday spending declined. On average, shoppers planned to spend $407.02 from Thursday through Sunday, compared with the average $423.55 spent during the 2012 Black Friday weekend. It was the first decline in Black Friday spending since the beginning of the Great Recession, when American shoppers spent less on the Black Friday weekend in 2009 compared to 2008, said Pam Goodfellow, the consumer insights director of Prosper.

Despite the decline in spending at the start of the season, NRF forecasts sales for the entire holiday shopping season will end on a strong note. The 2013 holiday retail season, which is composed of the months of November and December, will increase 3.9 percent to $602.1 billion, said Matthew Shay, NRF’s president and chief executive officer.

“Overall, the prediction of growth is on target,” Shay said during a Dec. 1 conference call with reporters and Wall Street analysts. “We’re encouraged that we saw increased shoppers and higher growth online,” he said of Black Friday weekend’s e-commerce. According to the survey, 4 in 10 shoppers said they shopped online during the weekend, and the average consumer spent $177.67 online during the weekend.

Shay said the shopping statistics were impressive considering the 2013 shopping season will be six days shorter than the 2012 holiday retail season, and that shoppers noted that they were going to spend less in 2013 compared to the previous year. Goodfellow noted that retailers can still expect an increase in sales because there are more shoppers; the American population has increased. In Dec. 1, 2012, the U.S. population was 314.9 billion people. One year later, it is 317.1 billion people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

A reason for decline in spending is shoppers’ uncertainty over the future of the economy, according to the Consumer Confidence Survey, released by The Conference Board, a non-profit business research group. The group’s index of consumer confidence declined in November and in October.

Apparel was among the most popular gift categories on Black Friday weekend. Approximately 57.5 percent surveyed purchased clothing and clothing accessories during the holiday weekend. The survey also found that 54.2 percent of shoppers visited department stores during the shopping weekend. The second most popular shopping destination was discount stores, where 38.9 percent of those surveyed shopped, 28.7 percent shopped at clothing and clothing accessories stores for gifts, 42.1 percent said that they shopped online during some part of the weekend.

During the conference call, Shay, the NRF president said that there was a good chance that the remainder of the 2013 holiday retail season would be promotional, and that retailers would be offering big discounts because the holiday season was shorter, and because the state of the economy was not performing at its optimum.

Black Friday sales also might have declined this year because the holiday shopping season had started much earlier, before October for some, than in the past. But shopping during Black Friday has become a tradition, Shay said, about 70.9 percent of people surveyed said that they shopped or planned to shop on the day of Black Friday, which is the day after Thanksgiving.