Like every year, America’s most famous shopping event of the year will fall on November 29, which is the day after Thanksgiving. According to Adobe Analytics, retailers are expecting to pull as much as $7.5 million in a single day which is a 20% increase from the total retail sale in 2018. It also predicts that even with this increase, retailers will be tackling with a shorter holiday period this year. This is because there will only be 26 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas in New Year, so businesses have their work cut out for them because they have about less than a week than the time, they had in the same period in 2018.
Because of this, businesses could miss out on as much as $1 billion in revenue according to reports. This has caused retailers to start sales earlier than usual. For example, Walmart began its holiday sales online one week earlier as compared to last year when they started it in the last week of October. NPD analyst Marshal Cohen said that it’s not only the shorter time period that businesses need to worry about. They are also likely to suffer due to from Christmas falling in the middle of the week, on a Wednesday, in 2019.
“It takes the pressure of Super Saturday away,” Cohen told Business Insider’s Hayley Peterson in a recent conversation. Super Saturday is the Saturday before Christmas Day, when many shoppers dash to stores to make last-minute purchases — and possibly spend more money because of the time crunch.
“Everybody sits there and says, ‘Oh, I got a couple more days. I don’t have to rush and fight the crowds.’ That keeps people from fighting the frenzy, and the frenzy feeds the beast,” he said.
Overall, he’s expecting a “lackluster” holiday season in 2019.
Walmart is among the first of the major retailers to serve the hottest Black Friday deals. It’s hard to consider them as true Black Friday deals since they’re launching in late October. Nevertheless, the deals are good, and they are likely a strong sign of what other sale prices are expected in the next few weeks.
As for what’s discounted right now, we’re seeing the best prices yet on the Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS + LTE, 38mm), the Xbox One S gaming console, the sixth-generation iPad, and a lot more. We’ll be updating this post as new Walmart deals arrive from now until Black Friday, which kicks off on Friday, November 29th.
With the holiday season upon us, industry powerhouses are locked neck to neck in marketing and sales wars. Best Buy and Target tend to run similar sales and events, though Target has proven that it loves to fall back on gift cards to help increase promotions and drive sales. Target’s gift card promotions tend to be in large-dollar amounts whereas Best Buy typically offers larger discounts upfront with the occasional gift card attached to a promotion. Both sales tactics work well for the larger retailers and we predict that similar marketing campaigns i n 2019.
