Is Black Friday Over?
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Is Black Friday over? Is it a thing of the past? Yeah, I’m going to come out and say it is done. Done. And good riddance. Man, I remember doing I remember doing radio shows and making fun of the I’m sorry, the fools. OK, the fools that would be camped out, camped out in front of Best Buy or Wal-Mart.
waiting to get in and battle everyone for some sort of damn deal to save a couple of bucks. And the whole time I’m thinking to myself, wouldn’t your time be better spent going out and making more money? Ah, could be me calling me crazy. Those go along with the idiots that sleep out in front of Apple stores. I don’t even do that anymore. Or the Star Wars freaks.
I gotta make sure I’m first in line to go see the latest Star Wars movie. Yeah, you do that, buddy. Anyway, anyway, let’s talk about the numbers and the changing nature of retail. This has been in the cards for a long time, a long time. But I do have to say that the whole lockdown COVID situation has sped it up, sped it up. I don’t…
think that we’d be in the position right now where we’d be seeing these types of numbers if COVID didn’t happen. I just, quite frankly, people just got used to, became more friendly with the idea of ordering things online. I admit I’m one of them too. You’re taking a look at some of the numbers from this past weekend. Believe it or not.
Thanksgiving Day was a booming day for online sales. And I thought about it and I said, wait a second, did I shop on Thanksgiving? And I said, I did, I needed some things, some office supplies and I did order some stuff from Staples. So I guess I contributed to that as well, but Black Friday spending hits online record as shoppers avoid crowds.
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$10 billion spent online as customers, consumers, excuse me, desperate for deals, largely opted to avoid chaotic crowds. I don’t know, maybe that’s a good sign for this country. I mean, for crying out loud. I saw some, it was like back in the day thing when people on Black Friday were waiting in line and were fights breaking out for Cabbage Patch Kids. Remember those ugly looking dolls?
by Coleco back in the 1980s. Yeah, a lot of things, electronics, smartwatches, televisions, toys, you name it. Again, it’s all moving online. However, again, the store numbers are not good. This is slowest pace, even though they expect sales to increase, it’s the slowest pace in five.
years, a lot of Walmart’s and stores around the country, half empty. Half empty, according to various different places, a lot quieter this year. It’s a lot quieter. Again, people, they figured it out now. You know, where some company would advertise, you know, an inexpensive TV, we all know that, you know, it’s all it is, is a simple search. You can find the same deal somewhere else.
And again, you’re watching the changes that are taking place and how people go about buying things and the nature of retail is going to continue to change. And again, this is something that I’m looking forward to seeing companies that are actually embracing this faster than others. Quite frankly, a lot of the big box retailers, they’re caught up in these massive leases that they still have that quite frankly, I do believe that they wanna get out of sooner rather than later. I mean, just go into a big box store.
and try to find help in any of these, but I don’t care if it’s Best Buy, doesn’t make any difference. It’s like you’re gonna yell out to somebody and you feel like it’s gonna echo throughout the entire store. They’re completely understaffed. And again, they don’t have the same amount of inventory. They’re kind of recognized, gee whiz, we don’t have to hold so much here in stores. Why? Well, if we don’t have it, we can most certainly get it to your house in a very short.
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period of time. I mean, go again, go online. You want to pick out a TV and electronic device, go to Best Buy’s website, click on it, and it’ll give you an option. You can pick it up at this store. It might not be available at this store, but we can have it at your house and lickety split. Again, the biggest delivery business in the United States right now is not it’s not UPS. It’s not FedEx.
It’s Amazon. Amazon delivered more packages to US homes in 2022 than UPS after eclipsing FedEx in 2020, and the gap is going to continue to widen. So you’ve got three delivery services out there. And again, Amazon, to me, it’s you know, can’t get stuff delivered the same day. You have that option. If you’re an Amazon Prime member,
extraordinary. Now, what does this mean for retailers? What does this mean if you’re a Macy’s, if you’re a Saks, if you’re a Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, whatever, Coles, whatever it may be. If they were smart and you’re starting to see signs of this and again I’ll give an anecdotal story of myself here. Okay, I went to buy a new suit and I’m at Bloomingdale’s and you know they
my size. So again, but they had a suit there in the color that I wanted, but they had a suit in the same style and a different color that I didn’t want. So what did I do? I tried it on. Tried it on, fits, like it, boom, guess what? It’s at my house in a couple of days. This is going to be also a pushback in regards to theft when it comes to stores. You’re going to see them, you know, maybe keep
one item at one size out on a shelf, most certainly cutting back on the amount that they have out there. And if they don’t have it, again, the way that logistics work here in the United States, quite frankly, Macy’s and Nordstrom, all these companies, they can outsource it to Amazon. They can outsource it. They got three different options in getting it to you.
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And in many respects, if you’d rather keep stuff in warehouses so it won’t be stolen, you could have that stuff delivered the same day. So again, I would expect the footprint of many of these massive retail stores to shrink and continue to shrink. Again, you still have New York City, you still have that Macy’s Herald Square, that massive, it’s the size of an entire block.
that Macy’s store there and guess what? Guess what? I went to the Black Friday football game there at the MetLife Stadium. It was one of the worst football games I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Tailgate kick butt, I did the cooking. But anyway, neither here nor there. Yeah, we drove by. Waze took us from Long Island, took us through Manhattan. We drove right by it. It was dead.
on Black Friday, dead. Again, that’s a big piece of real estate you’re gonna have to continue to maintain there, my friends. And again, you’re gonna continue to see more and more of these outlets unload these various different properties, because quite frankly, they don’t make sense anymore. Again, the nature of retail is changing. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.
