Retailers anticipate Black Friday sales to run high this year but don’t share the same hopes for the holiday season at large.
People are looking forward to, even relying on the Black Friday deals to ease Holiday bills but are not expected to indulge with any consistency in regularly priced items. Last year marked the least successful black Friday in decades, but now, retailers who survived a dark year will have the benefit of less competition.
Retail sales have been stabilizing in the last couple of months although nothing is definitive enough for legitimate predictions to be made. The National Retail Federation has made no official estimates for Black Friday but has forecast a 1% sales drop overall for the season.
Last year, 172 million shoppers visited stores and websites over the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend spending an average of 7.2 percent more than in 2007 when only 147 million shopper braved the madness. This improvement; however was not meant to be an indicator for the rest of the season as much as it was a display of peoples desperateness for deals in the tough time. For 2008, holiday shopping fell 3.2 percent, the first drop on record.
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