Opening for Thanksgiving Day Won't Deliver Significant Holiday Sales Bump, Says NPD
“The excitement of Thanksgiving Day store openings has now faded, making them a low risk, low reward proposition,” said NPD analyst Marshal Cohen in a report. Closing for Thanksgiving Day won’t be detrimental for stores, and those that open “won’t…
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see a significant boost this year either,” Cohen said. The spike the retail industry will get during the peak Thanksgiving week will come from online sales, which will “continue to grow,” he said. Two-thirds of consumers plan to do at least some of their holiday shopping online this holiday season, said a September NPD survey of 3,785 consumers ages 18 and older. Some 30 percent of holiday shoppers plan to start hitting stores over Thanksgiving weekend vs. 12-16 percent prior to 2014 when online shopping began its steep incline, said the analyst. It will be the first shopping season when more U.S. consumers begin shopping in the middle of the season, defined as Thanksgiving weekend through Cyber Monday, vs. “late” in the season, or early December, he said. “Despite all the efforts in recent years to get shoppers shopping before Black Friday week we see little to no movement early in the season, but the last-minute shoppers have moved their timing up.”