This weekend, national retailers saw 247 million shoppers flock to their stores and websites according to data from the National Retail Federation, or NRF. Local Missouri retailers have high expectations as well.
Across the nation, consumers shelled out a record-breaking $59.1 billion over Black Friday weekend. For retailers, this represents a spending growth of about 13% over last year, as the NRF reports.
Scott Thorne is a professor of management and marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. He says these numbers more than meet expectations.
“Projections were about 3.8 to 4 percent sales over the weekend, and we’ve blown that away. 9 to 13% sales increases nationwide and 80% of the population got out and shopped some time over this past weekend," Thorne said. "That’s just amazing.”
Thorne says one of the attributes to such high numbers this year is in part to new sales and advertising tactics by retailers.
“A lot of them took advantage of the Small Business Saturday promotion,” Thorne said. We saw a lot of businesses opening up early, a lot of them trying to do promotions. You’re seeing a lot of use of social media. There was a Black Friday hashtag, there was a Small Business Saturday hashtag.”
Thorne says for a city like Cape Girardeau, Small Business Saturday and aggressive advertising through social media sites could be the answer to more business for small local retailers.
Bruce Domazlicky, the Director of the Center for Economic and Business Research at Southeast, agrees that thriving holiday business is vital to both small businesses and large chain retailers in the area.
“If you look at a typical retail store from January until about late fall, the store does okay, but in many cases they don’t really start to turn much of a profit until the Christmas shopping season starts,” Domazlicky said. “And so it’s very important in that respect and that’s one reason it’s called Black Friday. ”
Cape Girardeau retailers enjoy their own unique advantage.
According Domazlicky, Cape Girardeau is an isolated shopping hub that draws consumers from neighboring regions to the area.
“Clearly the big draw is Cape Girardeau. It really is the major center in the area. The main competition that a city like Cape Girardeau is going to have is from either St. Louis or Memphis,” Domazlicky said. “Those are the only two areas that are larger in terms of the options that they provide and so that does give Cape Girardeau a leg up.”
Domazlicky says that while the numbers are encouraging, consumer behavior for Black Friday sales is not always an accurate indication of the nation’s economic state.
Officials with the Missouri Retail Association say that although it is still early in the shopping season, they expect the state to see retail growth as high as 6 to 8%.