Black Friday Packs the Malls – Early!

Early reports are that mall retailers gained the early edge in this year’s holiday shopping season.

According to this morning’s New York Times, ShopperTrak RCT (Chicago), which measures purchases at 45,000 mall-based stores, found that sales for Black Friday — the day after Thanksgiving — rose 6 percent from last year. On the same day in 2005, sales at stores monitored by ShopperTrak dropped 0.9 percent.

Discount chains, even with their pre-dawn openings and deep discount loss leaders, lagged behind. Department stores, too, showed unaccustomed strength.

J. C. Penney (Plano, Texas), reported “brisk traffic” at its stores on Friday. Terry Lundgren, chairman, president and ceo of Federated Department Stores (Cincinnati), said “we are off to a strong start.”

Retail analysts credited the strong performance of mall stores to an unusually aggressive posture this holiday season, pushing up their openings to as early as midnight and offering bigger early-morning deals. The Gap (San Francisco) offered 30 percent off purchases of $50 or more until noon Friday and Limited Too (New Albany, Ohio) promoted a buy-one-get-one-half-off sale.

Ernest Speranza, the chief marketing officer at KB Toys Inc. (Pittsfield, Mass.), told The Times that customers showed up for the discounts but walked out with full-priced merchandise. KB marketed Barbie dolls at 30 percent off, yet thousands of customers still bought higher-priced Bratz dolls. “I think the customer is in the mood to spend,” he said. “They seem very up, very positive.”

It was the earliest Black Friday on record. CompUSA (Dallas) started its annual Black Friday sales at 9 p.m. on Thursday.

An experiment with midnight openings bolstered mall traffic across the country. The crowds swelled to 20,000 at the Christiana Mall in Newark, Del.; 50,000 at the Maine Mall in Portland, Maine; and 15,000 at the Fashion Place Mall in Murray, Utah (accompanied by disorder among the normally peaceful residents). Shortly after midnight yesterday, shoppers pushed and shoved their way into Fashion Place, joined shortly thereafter by the police, responding to reports of nine skirmishes. Shoppers ransacked stores and overturned piles of clothes. Clerks were forced to shut their doors. The mall even briefly closed its outside doors to avoid a fire hazard.

Stores outside the mall, like Best Buy (Richfield, Minn.), Wal-Mart (Bentonville, Ark.) and Target (Minneapolis), drew large crowds by dangling deals like 42-inch flat-screen TVs for less than $1,000. But the November results from Wal-Mart (see item below) have dampened the outlook for big-box retailers.