This year, retailers kicked off the holiday season early with deals beginning prior to Thanksgiving weekend. The encouragement from retailer sales to have consumers begin their holiday shopping early, has made some impact with this year breaking record revenue over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales prove positive in predicting the rest of this holiday season, but will the rest of the season be as profitable? According to Forbes many consumers are being more intentional with their shopping, while others are spending over $500 outside their budgets. In order to continue on the path of revenue that retailers saw over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, consumers need to continue shopping to reach the end goal of continued revenue.

Carol Spieckerman, President of Spieckerman Retail, provides her insights on what the beginning spike of the holiday season could mean long term for retailers.

Carol’s Thoughts:

“So, let’s talk numbers. According to a new survey by NRF and Prosper, the number of consumers that shopped over Black Friday weekend was up by single digits in-store. Traffic was up a whopping 17%, and small business Saturday had a nice bump too. So, is Holiday 2022 going to be a boom or a bust? Well, you could argue both sides.

On the cautionary front, what we’re really talking about is a weeks-long promotional marathon that retailers have unleashed. One that’s punctuated by events like Cyber Monday and Black Friday. So, the events can cause spikes, but it doesn’t necessarily speak to a long-term trend. Also, with retailers pulling out all the stops as early as October, you could also argue that spending’s happening earlier, but not necessarily continuing on from there. And other factors like those inventory pileups we keep talking about, slowdowns in discretionary spending, returns, and the dramatic uptick in organized crime theft in retail that we talked about in my last video, all of that means that those factors can weigh down results even when sales are up.

Now on the bright side, retailers know that multichannel shoppers are their very best customers. The fact that both online and in-store activity is up, is a really good sign, and that jump in in-store sales in particular is really encouraging because that’s where customers the aisle into ideally more profitable categories, and it’s where impulse shopping tends to happen. So, two big takeaways. First of all, the jury’s definitely still out and we won’t have a final verdict for several weeks. And secondly, even though seeing any increases is very welcome right now, especially on the heels of all the doomsday prognosticating we’ve been hearing, profitability is still the end game.