black friday retail sales numbers

[Rich Toscano]

[quote=paramount]
The author states that money shouldn’t be counted in M2 until in a depositors account.[/quote]

Yes… and it isn’t (contrary to what he claims in the article).

[ltsddd]

[quote=no_such_reality]How bad was it last year? I haven’t a challenge finding parking at any mall or store we’ve gone to yesterday or today.
[/quote]

All depends on when you showed up. My experience is that if you showed up after sunrise all the great deals (door busters) are pretty much gone and so is the crowd. The last time I did a BF was when Circuit City was still around. Showed up around 9:00 a.m., didn’t have trouble finding parking, but all the great deals were gone by then also.

[Coronita]

Well one other possibility. Because since some stores starts on Thanksgiving day now, perhaps they are eating into Black Friday sales?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/shoppers-buy-earlier-holiday-season-001914179.html

[Rich Toscano]

More from Ritholtz: http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/11/black-friday-skepticism-finally-goes-mainstream/

He is not a fan of these early black fri numbers…

[CA renter]

[quote=Rich Toscano]As far as Black Friday goes, Barry Ritholtz offered the idea that people crowding the stores to get the discounts while they are available is a sign of consumer weakness, not strength. I’m not convinced of that but it’s an interesting idea. I guess we will have to see what the rest of the season looks like retail spending wise…[/quote]

This is what happened in 2007, which was the slowest season I’ve ever seen in my life (based on the physical presence of shoppers wherever we looked, and personal discussions with various retailers — we made a point of traveling around different counties in So Cal to see how the shopping malls, outlets, and restaurants were doing). The inventory piled up in the second half of 2007, so retailers discounted by a very large margin. That brought lots of shoppers out, but the stores were losing money in many cases because many people only bought the loss leaders and went home.

While this year is certainly busier than 2007 from what we’ve seen, I get the sense that the discounts are steeper and people are focusing on these cheaper items.

Like many of us were saying before the bubble burst, it will take some time for people to realize this isn’t your “standard” recession. Things have not picked up for a lot of people since the credit bubble burst. IMHO, they are just now beginning to realize that they will have to cut back significantly if they want to financially survive the coming years.

[flyer]

[quote=CA renter][quote=Rich Toscano]As far as Black Friday goes, Barry Ritholtz offered the idea that people crowding the stores to get the discounts while they are available is a sign of consumer weakness, not strength. I’m not convinced of that but it’s an interesting idea. I guess we will have to see what the rest of the season looks like retail spending wise…[/quote]

This is what happened in 2007, which was the slowest season I’ve ever seen in my life (based on the physical presence of shoppers wherever we looked, and personal discussions with various retailers — we made a point of traveling around different counties in So Cal to see how the shopping malls, outlets, and restaurants were doing). The inventory piled up in the second half of 2007, so retailers discounted by a very large margin. That brought lots of shoppers out, but the stores were losing money in many cases because many people only bought the loss leaders and went home.

While this year is certainly busier than 2007 from what we’ve seen, I get the sense that the discounts are steeper and people are focusing on these cheaper items.

Like many of us were saying before the bubble burst, it will take some time for people to realize this isn’t your “standard” recession. Things have not picked up for a lot of people since the credit bubble burst. IMHO, they are just now beginning to realize that they will have to cut back significantly if they want to financially survive the coming years.[/quote]

BINGO–CAR. Glad to hear someone else realizes it will soon be a matter of financial survival–and I’m not talking about the “out there” folks, I’m talking about the “average” American household.

If we had not planned well, and saved far more than we think we’ll ever need, I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep.

[Hobie]

[quote=flyer].. one of the reasons most people can’t afford to retire well–which may become an almost insurmountable problem in the near future.[/quote]

Exactly. While most are focusing on the short term needs and wants, this issue is going to get a lot more attention in the next decade where people won’t have the funds to live and cannot work any longer. Will be looking to government for help. Ugg.

[Coronita]

[quote=Hobie][quote=flyer].. one of the reasons most people can’t afford to retire well–which may become an almost insurmountable problem in the near future.[/quote]

Exactly. While most are focusing on the short term needs and wants, this issue is going to get a lot more attention in the next decade where people won’t have the funds to live and cannot work any longer. Will be looking to government for help. Ugg.[/quote]

And that’s the problem with the direction our government is going….They’re going to give it, at the expense of everyone else that was responsible…No concept of moral hazard…

[Hobie]

So true. What troubles me is that financial prudence is not taught ( or understood) at home. High school should fill this gap and really prepare kids in daily life skills including the value of compounding interest.

[livinincali]

[quote=Hobie]So true. What troubles me is that financial prudence is not taught ( or understood) at home. High school should fill this gap and really prepare kids in daily life skills including the value of compounding interest.[/quote]

It’s really as simple as understanding exponential functions and how they end in a finite world. The problem with exponential functions is that for each doubling time you expand equal to all the previous production combined. Of course our problem is we fail to see the problem until we’re into the last doubling time. For instance medicare spending has gone from 80 billion to 800 billion in the last 30 years. We think we have time to deal with the problem but based on the doubling time we have 8 years until medicare expands to 1.6 trillion and 16 years until in expands to 3.2 trillion which is more than the entire federal budget.

The sad reality is that everybody can’t live a long comfortable retirement. Retirement for the masses that we’ve seen over the past 30 years is abnormal. It was a result of a huge population explosion where there were numerous children born that would eventually be able to support the adults. We just don’t have that dynamic going forward. Essentially the top 20% by some measure will get to retire comfortably, the rest will scrap by.

[Coronita]

[quote=Hobie]So true. What troubles me is that financial prudence is not taught ( or understood) at home. High school should fill this gap and really prepare kids in daily life skills including the value of compounding interest.[/quote]

The problem is that “financial education” is a subjective matter..It borders on “family values”…And unfortunately, you would have plenty of parents that would be up in arms if this was taught in a public school for that reason (even though personally I think it would be a good thing)…Particularly since those might be the same people who don’t understand it…

For example, if public school taught about the ills of compound interest on a 19.5% APR credit card, and then little johnny or mary comes home and tells mom/dad how bad it is, who knows if little johnny’s or mary’s parents are in the same boat…Hell, who knows if the teachers in the school aren’t in the same boat… Hence why you won’t ever get financial education taught in a public school in any meaningful way….Hell, you have parents objecting to homework and for kids to take mandatory science classes like chemistry….

http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/10/17/1437218/parent-questions-mandatory-high-school-chemistry

So in the absence of that, we’ll have Suzie Orman and Rich Dad/Poor Dad Robert Kiyosaki who will be happy to educate people for a “small fee”…

[sjk]

[quote=flu]Time to shift strategy….Looks like black friday sales are coming in good. Just got off the phone with a few folks that run shops in the mall. Sales are up 5-10% compared to last black friday…

Walmart claiming it’s done better than ever before…

Wonder how others are doing…[/quote]

I see it more like David Rosenberg flu….

Regards,

From Gluskin Sheff

What A Joke

The Saturday Globe and Mail (page 811 ran with this special feature:

Ready to Spend: An American Comeback Story

Once again, I have to stress that the true measure of a country’s standard of living is national income, not narcissistic spending. And the critical driver of income, beyond working-age population growth, is productivity. Not just labour, but multi-factor productivity. All the talk is about the revival of the consumer, but as we see in this post-Thanksgiving period, retailers are stepping over themselves to lure in shoppers by opening earlier than ever and discounting like they never have before. Call it deflationary growth. But what the article fails to notice is the downtrend in business capital spending. The article doesn’t mention that there has been no capital deepening in the USA. in well over a decade.

And what the article does seem to heed is the message that was so clearly delivered by Ben Bernanke last week, which is that the U.S. economy’s non-inflationary speed limit is in secular decline. And with that, as I put my market strategist hat on. I would say the fair-value P/E multiple is really only being supported now by the artificial manipulation by the Fed to drive real interest rates into record negative terrain.

* * *

And some other thoughts from Rosie:

Beware of all the talk of how great the post-Thanksgiving sales have been. All the comparisons are with year-ago levels, and a year ago, sales were not being pulled into Thanksgiving day as they were this time around, so these are not apple-to-apples benchmarks (the sort of person that leaves the family dinner on Thursday to head to Best Buy, Toys R Us, Target and Wal mart so as to be the first to line up for the 8 PM door-opening blockbuster deserves some social commentary — I’m not sure that is what the pilgrims had in mind when it came down to giving thanks). We heard the same blow-out Black Friday and Cyber Monday data this time in 2011 and the rest of the shopping season was a bit of a dud (see Early Push for Sales Undercuts Black Friday on page B1 of today’s NYT).

Meanwhile, the spending culture is alive and well in America, nonetheless, with ShopperTrak data showing 300 million store visits on Black Friday alone (that’s almost the entire population — didn’t anyone make it to work?). It’s not “Black Friday” any more but it has now become a four-day “Black Weekend” and as such, year-over-year data are very misleading (nobody can accuse the retailing lobby from not being creative — it is trying to make it a five-day weekend now with the extension to Mobile Tuesday I kid you not — see page 32 of the NYT).

There was a pundit on CNBC early this morning stating that the American consumer is “on fire”. Yet ShopperTrak also noted that while traffic was UP 3.5% year-on-year on Black Friday, actual dollar sales fell 1.8% (which goes to show how intense the “doorbuster promotions” were in cannibalizing retailer margins). Today’s WSJ cites an IBM survey, based on data from 500 retailers, that the average order per customer shrank 4.7% from a year ago. And an analysis by Chase Paymentech (a sub of JPMergan Chase) concluded that in-store sales tumbled 7% YoY on Saturday. The National Retail Federation was predicting, based on its survey, 147 million shoppers hitting the malls, but the actual, 137 million that it tracks fell short.

While Cyber Monday could provide a lift (after all, for the first time, over half of consumers said they shopped on-line over the weekend), this does not detract from the view that what the retailing community has done is condition the consumer to conduct as much of the holiday shopping as possible over one weekend. Again, remember last year’s pattern… if you loaded up on the S&P retailing group in mid-November of 2011, you ended up losing money by the end of the year… despite the initial “bullish” holiday spending data.

So the one conclusion to make right is it is too early to tell how the holiday shopping season will unfold, but we came off a Q3 where both the quarterly rate and YoY pace was 2% in real terms which is actually close to half the long-term trend. Retail sales slipped 0.3% in October if memory doesn’t escape me. And real personal incomes excluding government handouts peaked and began to roll over in July. Retailers have a declining personal savings rate to thank because the sort of low-paying jobs that are being created are hardly generating anything close to an enthusiastic trend on household incomes. I realize that the latest “bullish” University of Michigan consumer sentiment data captured everyone’s attention, but the weekly tracking by Rasmussen is actually showing that the influence from lower gas prices and higher equity/home values may be waning — this index slipped to 89.1 as of November 23rd from 95.2 on November 9th to stand at a six-week low.

Moreover, it will be interesting to see the extent to which the 40% of the five million Americans that received unemployment insurance react ahead of the possible expiry of their emergency benefits (see page A4 of today’s WSJ — Deadline Looms for Long-Term Unemployed) The spending impact could be as much as a $60 billion annual rate.

And business sentiment is certainly moribund, underscored not only by the survey data but also by the IPO calendar, which is devoid of any new deals in the pipeline both this week and next (see A Cold December for IPOs on page C3 of today’s WSJ).

THE BIG PICTURE

We remain in the throes of a secular era of disinflation. We also are in a long-term period of sub-par economic growth and below-average returns. This has become so well entrenched that U.S. pension plans now have more exposure to bonds than to stocks, as we highlighted two weeks ago. Look, this is not about being bearish, bullish or agnostic. It’s about being realistic and understanding that in our role as market economists, it is necessary to provide our clients with information and analysis that will help them to navigate the portfolio through these stressful times. Our crystal ball says to stick with what works in an uncertain financial and economic climate — in other words, maintain a defensive and income-oriented investment strategy.

It is our contention that in this post-bubble, mean-reverting process, the ability for policymakers to re-create the credit cycle, reflate asset values and ignite a consumer-led recovery is going to be thwarted by secular changes in attitudes towards borrowing, saving, discretionary spending and homeownership. In other words, even after enough debt is paid off, the baby boomers’ spending years will be focused on putting their money in the coffee can. The first of the boomers are now turning 65 and the median boomer is now 55, going on 56. At the margin, they will now be forced to plan for retirement by setting aside an ever-greater part of their paycheques as opposed to relying on the perceived level of their future net worth, which had become the norm over the past two decades as inflated asset values, first in equities and then in residential real estate, triggered unrealistic expectations of the intrinsic value and capital gains potential of their asset base — an asset base concentrated in inherently unproductive items such as the house.

The missing piece in most analysis regarding the efficacy of government policy in terms of rejuvenating a new cycle of borrowing and spending is the extent of trauma that has taken place on the household balance sheet since the housing bubble popped in 2006 and the equity bull market reversed course in 2007. We estimate that the cumulative loss of household net worth, even with the recovery in recent years. is $4.7 trillion. In other words, a 7% hole has been driven into the household balance sheet over a five year span, which has not happened since the 1930s. Household wealth is no higher today than it was in 2006, and this realization is really only now setting in.

The process of a secular rise in the U.S. personal savings rate and the dampening effect this will have on aggregate demand will be incredibly disinflationary for some time. While fiscal stimulus indeed cushioned the blow, the current reality is one of restraint, at a time when the output gap is closer to 6% — where it normally is in periods of deep recessions, not year-four of an expansion.

From a top-down perspective, what drives inflation is the shape and interaction of two different curves — the economy’s aggregate supply curve and the aggregate demand curve. The movements in these curves tell us where the “output gap” is at any moment in time—the “gap” between where the economy is actually operating and the level it would be operating at if it were running flat out at full employment. In other words, the “gap” measures the degree of slack in the labour and product markets, and this “gap” at 6% currently augurs for ‘fair-value’ or ‘equilibrium’ policy rates to be -2.4% according to our research, which is why at the zero bound. the Fed has been and will continue to focus on non-conventional measures aimed at lowering the cost of capital.

[paramount]

Create demand where there is no Need.

Black Friday Madness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_Ic_OvIPtU

[all]

I went to Walmart in Poway and took some pictures around 8pm. It was packed. I left 10 minutes later and there was 200+ people in line waiting to get in.

Target had about the same number of people waiting in line around 8:30pm.

Sports Authority was not that busy. I got there around 11:30pm and there were 20-30 people in the line already. 10 minutes to check out.

Best Buy around 1am was not that busy except for the ‘premium’ checkout line. They sent everyone buying computers/tablets through dedicated checkout in order to push upsells. There were maybe 50 people in the line ahead of me. I gave up 30 minutes later after I realized that it took them that long to process 5 people. Best Buy joined Staples on ‘do not bother with on BF’ list.

The line at Fry’s around 4am had 200-300 people (they opened at 6am). The checkout line there gets super long, but they have 50-60 cashiers open and they generally do a good job on BF. The parking lot at Lowes was empty at 7am and the store was not busier than usual.

I got most of the gifts (by number, not by $$) through Amazon. They had some very nice lightning deals.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=Rich Toscano]As far as Black Friday goes, Barry Ritholtz offered the idea that people crowding the stores to get the discounts while they are available is a sign of consumer weakness, not strength. I’m not convinced of that but it’s an interesting idea. I guess we will have to see what the rest of the season looks like retail spending wise…[/quote]
It does stand to reason that people who can afford to pay a little more for goods aren’t going to be the ones standing in crazy lines to get those goods at a discounted price. However, I do feel like in the US Black Friday shopping has become a bit of an event in itself. I actually know a person who went out on Thursday night with no specific purchase target; they just wanted to be a part of the action.
I do think Black Friday numbers are a questionable predictor of how the Holiday season will go for retailers, but because it’s the first data to come in, it’s the stuff that gets stared at the longest.
I’m pretty bullish on the US economy right now. I don’t see Europe’s issues spreading here, and I’m fairly confident we’ll have an (imperfect) fix to the Fiscal Cliff. Every number that comes out seems to fall into the “good, but not great” pile, and when enough of that data piles up, you can’t really ignore it all.

[Author]

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