Quantcast

Jeff Green Partners

A LEADER IN RETAIL REAL ESTATE FEASIBILITY

jgreen@jeffgreenpartners.com

415-847-1770

Jeff Green

Black Friday shopping frenzy creeps early and stays late this year

Bethany Clough / The Fresno Bee – Black Friday is different this year.

Not only is it really Black Thursday — also known as Thanksgiving — because so many stores are opening earlier than ever but the debate over it is louder than ever.

And Black Friday is not the traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping season anymore, with deals coming early and continuing well past the one day.

“Black Friday isn’t what Black Friday used to be. It’s bled into Thanksgiving,” says Phoenix-based retail consultant Jeff Green of Jeff Green Partners.

An estimated 140 million people will shop between Thursday and Sunday, about 61% of all people surveyed in a National Retail Federation/Prosper Insights & Analytics survey.

Analysts Talk About The Impact E-commerce Has On Holiday Shopping Trends

Mark Brodle / 91.5 KJZZ – Are you done with your holiday shopping yet? Based on when some stores started their Black Friday deals, you could have been done before your turkey was fully digested.

Joining me now to talk about the lengthening of the holiday shopping season is Phoenix-based retail analyst Jeff Green.

Jeff referenced Cyber Monday and as e-commerce has grown, so has the impact of taxes collected from online sales. But, they’re not collected uniformly across the country, and Congress’ efforts to change that have so far been unsuccessful.

Bill Fox is the Director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Tennessee and said in many cases, Cyber Monday is one of the most wonderful times of the year.

Lower gasoline prices fail to spur consumer spending

David Conti / TribLIVE Business – The sight of Western Pennsylvania stations selling gasoline for less than $3 a gallon five weeks before Christmas should bring joy to the holiday.

For some people, it’s not enough to fuel a shopping binge.

“It’s meant I can put more gas in my truck because it was so expensive for so long,” Erick Williams, 43, of Brighton Heights said as he filled up at an Exxon station in the North Side. “In the next couple weeks, if it stays this way, maybe we’ll have some extra left over.”

Expert: Retailers Train Consumers To Bargain Hunt

For Americans, Thanksgiving is that time when family and friends gather around the dinner table for the biggest feast of the year.

But for retailers, it’s the kickoff to the biggest shopping weekend of the year.

Retail analyst Jeff Green, who is president and CEO of Phoenix-based Jeff Green Partners, said retailers create a lot of hype around Black Friday weekend, but it’s getting increasingly harder for them to make a profit.

As Black Friday weekend has grown more competitve among retailers, consumers have grown accustomed to steeply discounted items, store-wide sales and especially doorbusters, which retailers often sell at a loss.

“Retailers have trained us to shop for only value. Shop sale items,” Green said. “I mean, you go into Macy’s, I’m mean how many people buy full price at Macy’s? So it’s not about having the money to do it. We’ve been taught not to do it. If we want to shop full price we’ll go to Nordstrom.”

Last year, retail sales from Thanksgiving Day to Sunday grew by a tepid 1 percent. This year, Green said he’s expecting retailers to do slightly better, with sales up anywhere between 2 and 5 percent.

Hooray for Holiday!

Barbra Murray / Commercial Property Executive – Experts in the retail sector of the commercial real estate industry believe it’s going to be a good holiday season–a really good holiday season. They can practically smell it.

“I believe this will be the best Black Friday weekend and Christmas season in the last seven years. The reason being that there’s a lot of optimism in the air,” Greg Maloney, president & CEO of commercial real estate services firm JLL’s Americas Retail Group, told Commercial Property Executive. “The consumer confidence index is at an all-time high since late 2007. People are feeling better. Gas prices are down. There’s just this air of excitement of people thinking things are better. Maybe they’re not but people want to believe that they are.”

Black Friday not holiday bellwether it once was

With the 2014 holiday sales season spread out longer, Black Friday is no longer the bellwether for holiday sales it once was, say veteran retail analysts.

Analysts offered a variety of numbers for the weekend, some showing sales increases, others showing decreases. The National Retail Federation reported that total projected sales were down 11 percent for the weekend, while spending over the entire holiday season will increase by 4.1 percent this year.

“We believe the drop in consumer spending was not a matter of consumers pulling back, but consumers responding to a much longer, heavily promoted and discounted holiday spending season that begins almost as soon as the Halloween costumes are returned to the attic,” said NRF SVP Bill Thorne. “Consumer spending for holiday gifts starts earlier and ends later as the post-recession consumer seeks the best deals at the price point they want to pay. Further, as mobile use continues to grow and on-line retailers become more competitive, the need to fight crowds in order to get the best deals becomes less important.”