The New Black Friday: Shoppers Are Spending Again, But Differently
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Here's your money briefing for Friday, November 26th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. It's Black Friday, but this year it may as well be called Green Friday. After more than a year of dealing with an unsettled economy and a recovering labor market, Americans and their spending plans are back.
It's sort of a mixed bag, but in general, this stuff is available. It costs more. People have money and they're buying it.
But while people aren't afraid to open their wallets, the economic recovery has upended the way consumers shop. Our Heard on the Street columnist Justin Layhart will join us to talk about it after the break.
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What a difference a year makes. This holiday season, Americans are back to work and many are fully vaccinated. That likely means a big jump in holiday spending. But how consumers spend their money this year will be different from 2020.
How are shoppers' attitudes different this Black Friday compared with last year?
WSJ Heard on the Street columnist Justin Lahart joins us to explain. Hey, Justin, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. So Justin, a year ago, which was just a few months before the first COVID vaccines were available, most people didn't want to leave their homes for almost any reason, let alone to shop. How much have things changed since then?
Yeah, it is very different this year, you know, and it's easy to forget how different it is that last year we weren't traveling, that last year you couldn't even go in a lot of stores, you couldn't go into restaurants. People stayed home. People didn't see their families. And this year, to some extent, people are making up for lost time.
Now, government data out this week shows that Americans enter the holiday shopping season with a running start. Consumer spending was up more than 6 percent last month from a year ago. But what's different this year in terms of how and where people are spending?
First thing, we're seeing that people are shopping in stores again. We can see this in things like Google Mobility data, which shows that store visits are up a lot. We can also see it in some reports. The Commerce Department does reporting on e-commerce sales. And in the third quarter, while e-commerce sales were up, From a year ago, sales away from e-commerce were up much more. Just this past week, both Best Buy and Dick's Sporting Goods said that their e-commerce sales have suffered relative to their other sales.
So why is this shift happening from online to physical stores?
You know, people are more comfortable shopping in stores where stores are open for business. There's not as many restrictions. So people are going back and people people like shopping in stores. A lot of people like shopping in stores that, you know, they didn't want to do all of their shopping online last year. They just had to. So we see, you know, move away for that.
Yeah, this might be good news for store owners, but what about higher inflation and all this talk we're hearing about supply chain issues and shortages?
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