"Black Friday gets off to a brisk start for Guilford County retailers"
http://www.greensboro.com/business/
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"Sales at retailers' brick-and-mortar locations suffered during the weekend after Thanksgiving as more shoppers skipped the malls and bought online.
About $1.73 billion was spent online on Thanksgiving Day, a 25 percent increase from last year, according to Adobe Systems.
...Retail observers say many of those online purchases are coming at the expense of trips to physical stores, costing merchants more in shipping and depriving them of the impulse sales they often make to shoppers wandering their aisles.
Smaller-than-expected crowds turned out at shopping centers in North Carolina, where Jeff Simpson, a director at Deloitte Consulting LLP's retail practice, was monitoring the action on Black Friday.
"Across the board, much less traffic than was anticipated," Simpson said, without giving specific figures. "Much, much slower."
..."This day is going to be a disappointing day," Siegel said. "If you have the right products you can win, but it's a tougher environment."
...smartphones accounting for 44.7 percent of all online traffic
...Amazon's Black Friday sales rose 20.8 percent from a year ago, the e-commerce tracker ChannelAdvisor said in a blog post on Saturday, slightly outpacing the 20.3 percent increase in overall comps for the day...
...Deloitte's Simpson saw less of a sense of urgency among consumers seeking deals. He scoped out pre-Black Friday opening crowds at three major retailers that he wouldn't identify, and said the lines had six to eight people, far less than in previous years.
"It's early," he said, "but it doesn't look great."
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-holiday-sales-bf6363a4-96b1-11e5-aca6-1ae3be6f06d2-20151129-story.html
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Google's Monday after Thanksgiving Business Section
At 8:39am, not one story covering the weekend's poor sales
https://news.google.com/news/section?cf=all&pz=1&topic=b&siidp=f35d949055d7bc4dffccdcdf258b2493423c
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"Black Friday Sales" Google search;
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=black+Friday+sales&oq=black+Friday+sales&gs_l=news-cc.3..43j0l7j43i53.149507.153940.0.154173.18.14.0.4.4.0.156.1125.8j6.14.0...0.0...1ac.1.26mahNj0taI
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"Black Friday Sales Down More Than $1 Billion
Brick and mortar sales on Black Friday fell from $11.6 billion in 2014 to $10.4 billion in 2015, according to the retail researcher ShopperTrak.
http://time.com/4128592/black-friday-sales-down/
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"The average shopper shelled out $299.60 over the weekend, said the federation, which commissioned Prosper Insights & Analytics to conduct the survey. But a change in methodology means that figure isn’t comparable to those from prior years. It had been $380.95 in 2014’s Black Friday weekend and $407.02 the year before.
The NRF also didn’t provide a total spending amount, something it included in past surveys. That figure had been down for two straight years, dropping 11 percent to $50.9 billion in 2014."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-29/clicks-defeat-bricks-during-u-s-retailers-black-friday-weekend
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Zero Hedge;
"Black Friday Total Sales Crash 10% (Despite Rise In Online Spend)"
"We can hear the mainstream media now - "Great News Everyone!! The American consumer is back" - online sales on Black Friday rose 10% to $1.7 billion which ComScore says shows "strong spending." The only problem is - which we suspect will be oddly missing from the mainstream narrative, as ShopperTrak reports total sales on Black Friday crashed 10% to $10.4 billion. While blame has been placed on early opening on Thanksgiving, that is false too since spending on that day also plunged 10%. So, the sales news is unequivocally bad - which is hardly surprising given the collapse in consumer confidence."
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-11-29/black-friday-total-sales-crash-10-despite-rise-online-spend
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It's almost as if it didn't happen.
US equity market futures are higher as of 8:55am
If the television didn't tell you, and you didn't read it in the paper,
it didn't happen.
This is Greensboro.
This is today's world.
This is Orwell.
