This Just In: Black Friday Sales Are Bogus [Must-See Chart]

Black Friday is dead.
Gone are the days when you and thousands of your closest friends spend a freezing evening in a Walmart parking lot just to get your hands on a cheap flat screen television.
Sure, some gleeful idiots still enjoy the anarchy that goes hand in hand with bashing in a big box store’s front doors at 3 a.m. But the idea of Black Friday as a make-or-break event for retail sales is now extinct.
Don’t let the upbeat headlines fool you. While more than 150 million people braved the crowds on Black Friday last week, consumers didn’t spend as much as they did last year.
As it turns out, shoppers weren’t interested in regularly priced items. This year it was extreme discounts – or bust.
According to the National Retail Federation, 36% of shoppers said all of their buys were sale items. This exclusive purchase of deeply discounted items increased more than threefold from last year, Bloomberg notes, ‘setting an ominous tone for the rest of the holiday season – retailers’ biggest sales period of the year.’

This post was published at Examiner by Greg Guenthner ‘ November 29, 2016.