WARWICK and CRANSTON – At smaller shops on this Black Friday morning, managers and clerks had an optimistic outlook, but they also had fewer shoppers than the bigger retailers that were offering door-buster sales and deep price cuts.
By about 10 a.m. at the Pendleton Woolen Mills clothing and jewelry store in Garden City Center, Cranston, sales clerks Laurie Valle and Cheryl Robi said they had a few sales. They were optimistic about the rest of the day.
Customer traffic had been fairly slow so far, “but they’ll be here,” Valle said. “They know we have a sale and they’ll be in this afternoon. We have a more mature customer, shall we say, and they’ll be here.”
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Meanwhile, at Best Buy on Route 2 in Warwick, the parking lot was packed well before 9 a.m. and some customers had waited in line from 10 a.m. yesterday until the store’s 5 a.m. opening this morning.
General Manager Steve Faison, who started work today at 3 a.m., said sales so far had been “fantastic.” He said customers were coming in for laptops and flat-panel LCD TVs.
“Right now, it’s looking good,” Faison said. “We haven’t really seen any decline – we’ve seen a slight decline in traffic, but people are still out spending money.”
Similar results were seen nationwide, as big-box retailers discounted many items as much as 70 percent and some opened their doors as early as midnight, Bloomberg News reported.
By 9 a.m. today, Providence residents Gigi and Noel Velasco had visited both JC Penney in the Providence Place mall and Best Buy in Warwick. At the latter, they bought two Insignia digital photo frames.
“We never do this, I think it’s ridiculous,” Gigi Velasco said. “I don’t think I’ve ever gone shopping on Black Friday, but we wanted to get [Noel’s] kids something special this year and we saw a special in the newspaper.”
Twenty percent of total annual revenue for U.S. retailers comes in November and December, National Retail Federation figures show. For some sectors, the percentage is even higher: Jewelers realize 31 percent of annual sales during those two months, and department stores 24 percent, the trade group has said.
The NRF is predicting holiday sales nationwide will rise 2.2 percent this year to $470.4 billion. (READ MORE)
That would be well below the 4.0-percent increase the trade group was calling for last year at this time (READ MORE), not to mention the average annual holiday sales growth of 4.76 percent that U.S. retailers saw during the 1997-to-2006 period. But it also would be a sharp improvement from this October, when sales fell 0.5 percent year-over-year after seasonal adjustment, according to an NRF report earlier this month.
The National Retail Federation is a trade group based in Washington, D.C. For additional information, visit www.nrf.org. To learn more about Portland, Ore.-based Pendleton Woolen Mills, which operates 75 stores nationwide, visit www.pendleton-usa.com. For information about consumer electronics and appliance retailer Best Buy, visit www.BestBuy.com.
