Political | Process

On Thanksgiving day, visits to brick-and-mortar stores cratered 90.4% from 2019 levels, Sensormatic found.

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• Retailers including Target, Walmart and Best Buy opted to keep their doors closed to customers on the holiday. Target has said it will be a permanent shift.

• Field said that shopper traffic on Black Friday was closest to returning to 2019 levels in the South, followed by the Midwest and then the West and Northeast. He doesn’t believe mounting fears around the new Covid variant, omicron, had any impact on consumers’ behavior on the day.

• “If you start seeing outbreaks in the U.S., the thing that I think would drive [traffic down] would be if governments and communities start locking down again,” Field said. “Otherwise, I think the trends will be very similar to what we expect them to be.”

• Online, retailers rang up $8.9 billion in sales on Black Friday, down from the record of about $9 billion spent on the Friday after Thanksgiving a year earlier, according to data from Adobe Analytics. It marked the first time ever that growth reversed from the prior year, Adobe said.

• Adobe analyzes more than one trillion visits to U.S. retail sites, with over 100 million items in 18 different product categories.

SOURCE: CNBC