Another Black Friday

Pfreemanevans | November 26, 2007, 10:04 PM

If you look at just the top line sales, Black Friday 2007 was a great success - increase of anywhere between 7 and 8.3% have been reported. This is much in excess of the overall holiday retail season increase of 4% projected by the National Retail Federation. Good news. And, we are seeing reports that the increase was due to more people flocking to the stores. So the hype and advertising worked. Again great, also because the primary reason people choose a store to buy from is previous experience. So good.

But, on the other hand, the average order value has been reported to be less than last year. It looks like the $1000+ HDTV’s are not the hot item anymore, but rather $129 GPS and $150 digital picture frames are moving briskly, along with the traditional categories of apparel, books, cd's and dvd's. But also, if the offers were more aggressive than last year for the same merchandise, AOV goes down again.

Last year, we saw a strong Black Friday weekend but a bit of a soft December. Perhaps we have trained holiday customers more than we have the rest of the year to only buy during the big promotions.