Remember way back in 2009 or so when Thanksgiving Day planning consisted of figuring out who was bringing dessert, where to watch the Macy s Day Parade, how to work the feast in around the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys and how to keep drunken Uncle Billy from arguing with pretty much everybody about how the Republic hasn t been the same since we left the gold standard?
Now you ve got to throw shopping into the mix. We re not here to judge, though some will. You enjoy your holiday however you want. But understand that Thanksgiving Day shopping is a thing — a thing that is growing online and in stores.
Our numbers show, over the last three years that Thursday sales are growing at a pretty rapid pace, Bill Martin, of ShopperTrak, told NBC News. It s leaching sales from Black Friday.
In fact, it s gotten so that those who make a spectator sport of charting holiday shopping (OK, analysts who need to know this stuff for strategic reasons), now lump late Thanksgiving and early Black Friday into its own shopping period.
As we head into Thanksgiving, I thought it would be interesting to look at last year s holiday/shopping day as a way to inform what we might be in for in 2014. Kathy Grannis, of the National Retail Federation recently pulled together statistics, which show that nearly 45 million Americans shopped on Thanksgiving Day in 2013, about half the number who shopped on Black Friday that year.
In fact, the NRF report concludes that 64 percent of holiday shoppers made it to the store in 2013 on Thanksgiving Day or by 10 a.m. on Black Friday. And if you throw in online shoppers and look at the entire Thanksgiving weekend, nearly 250 million people, or about 80 percent of the United States, shopped over the four days.
E-commerce, in particular, has seen a Thanksgiving Day surge — and why not when you can furtively bag that digital doorbuster by working your iPhone between passing the cranberry sauce and the stuffing? An Adobe analysis put online sales on Thanksgiving Day at a cool $1 billion and the company is predicting an increase to $1.35 billion this year.
Consumers will be able to get the best deals this year if they shop online on Thanksgiving Day, Brad Rencher, Adobe s senior vice president for digital marketing, said in a written statement. Smartphones and tablets continue to drive more and more sales online, which will lead to new sales records on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Adobe is projecting that Thanksgiving will be the most mobile day of the year (furtive, remember), with 31 percent of online sales being generated by smartphones and tablets. For its part, IBM is predicting that for the first time ever more than half of online shopping visits will be made with mobile devices.
Not a bad kick-off to a shopping season that some say has kicked off already. Overall, once the dust has settled and the money is counted, consumers will have spent about $50 billion over the four-day weekend, the NRF says.
Something to think about on Thanksgiving as you reach for that golden brown drumstick — or your iPad.
Photo: Customers grab their carts to head to the items they want to buy shortly after the midnight opening of Best Buy in Oakland, Calif. on Nov. 22, 2012. Best Buy was one of many stores that opened at midnight with Black Friday deals. Nowadays, some stores are opening on Thanksgiving day. (Laura A. Oda/Bay Area News Group)
Mike Cassidy is BloomReach s storyteller. Contact him at , follow him on Twitter at @mikecassidy.
