Retail Eye Partners: Recap on Black Friday

New York City Retail Eye Partners offered a recap of Black Friday shopping in which it noted that over the weekend as a whole, shoppers still appeared very focused on purchasing only discounted and sale items (particularly advertised items). It saw little evidence of impulse and self-purchasing, with the exception of Uggs, which remain one of the few items shoppers are willing to buy now and at full price, according to Retail Eye Partners’ principals, Lisa Walters and Sapna Shah.

Similar to Black Friday, buying over the weekend remained very concentrated on consumer electronics items, including TVs, game players and accessories and lower-priced DVDs and games, the firm said. Shoppers seemed to be flocking to value-oriented stores, even if they are only offering similar deals and sales as those that they do normally each weekend (albeit named differently given the time of year), the report said.

Looking ahead, Walters and Shah offered the following: 

• We believe promotions are still very much needed to drive shopper traffic, especially to specialty and higher end/aspirational stores;
• We expect shoppers to remain very budget-conscious through the holiday season, and expect retailers to continue to promote and offer deals both online and in stores throughout December in order to try and capture what remains of shoppers’ holiday budgets;
• We expect higher levels of discounting early in December as retailers try to sell down inventories earlier in the season to avoid the heavy discounting we saw during the week before Christmas last year.