I have been talking to sales people. They are telling me they will be surprised to see 2/3 of last years sales at the same time. I am going to predict a poor to disatrous BF. Black Friday extends to Internet Monday, so Tuesday the sentiment begins to come in.
Last year BF was right after things went bad for the banks, but it may have been too early to sink in for the general public. Dow was up 1000 points from its lows this same week last year. Anyway this year has got to be >>>>>>>>>>>> better than expected!
I think last year there was a surplus so they lowered the prices to get rid of the inventory. The deals for computers and components were terrible compared to last year. Memory prices are actually higher this year.
Stores were definitely not that crowded. You would think that sales are down, unless more people are gravating towards online purchases.
Right, this is key imo. Without normalizing sales numbers for inventory, you can't really tell what is going on.
Thing is, this whole thing about cyber Monday doesn't quite ring true to me. The only logic that follows imo is, people that went shopping on Black weekend didn't find anything they wanted (or more likely the deal went to the thousands that camped outside the store) in the brick and mortar, so they go online. But they go online exactly on Monday? I don't buy it. Probably happens some over the weekend and some over the following week. There is no way to tell either how these sales are going, AFAIK.
I don't understand what all the fuss is over retail sales. Most of the merchandise is imported from Asia. It would actually be *good* news if sales were substantially less as that would mean less pressure on the dollar and maybe, just maybe less jobs going to foreign shores. It's really dumb to be cheering consumers to spend their last borrowed $buck on imported crap!
That's another way of saying that you want corporations to hurt. Less sales won't help get new jobs, but it willl surely lose existing ones.
Does it matter though? Serious question. If the market rallies on bad unemployment with little chance of improvement, would black friday sales- which are hard to quantify to begin with, make a difference? I'm sure theres some BS reason for a rally, or no reason such as excess liquidity (thanks fed).