Black Friday deals enticed 151 million shoppers

There's little doubt Black Friday is not the one-day, mall-centric mob scene that it used to be. But legions of shoppers still opened their wallets between Thanksgiving and Sunday, according to surveys and other data collected over the weekend about the retail industry's annual frenzy of deals and discounts.

The National Retail Federation found that 51.7 percent of consumers, or 151 million people, shopped online or in stores this holiday weekend and spent an average of $299.60 each. The trade group said it changed the methodology this year of its annual, so figures could not be compared fairly with last year's results. Therefore, it is difficult to say, based on the NRF survey, whether Black Friday sales were more or less enticing to shoppers than they were last year.

Nevertheless, the survey seemed to suggest an extension of a pattern seen for several years: As retailer's deals have spread out over many days - or weeks - shoppers are staggering their visits to malls and are turning to their favorite e-commerce sites for discounts long before Cyber Monday.

Of those who shopped in a store over the long weekend, 73 percent said they went on Black Friday, 34 percent said they shopped Thanksgiving Day, and 46 percent on Saturday. Based on previous surveys it conducted this fall, the NRF thinks many people began holiday shopping long before Thanksgiving Day.

Matthew Shay, chief executive of the NRF, used a football analogy to describe how much the rhythm of the shopping season has changed in recent years.

"It's almost the second quarter going on halftime, whereas once upon a time, this was really where the game started," Shay said on a Sunday conference call with reporters.

Other data from the weekend suggest that shoppers are increasingly looking online to score deals. RetailNext, a company that provides in-store analytics software to retailers, said in-store traffic was flat over the weekend and that sales were down 1.5 percent at bricks-and-mortar outposts. Meanwhile, Thanksgiving Day online sales were a record $1.73 billion, according to Adobe, whose software is used by many large e-commerce sites. Black Friday sales were $2.74 billion, about 14 percent greater than last year, Adobe said.

Consumer confidence was improving coming into the holiday season, yet major chains such as Macy's, Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters and Dillard's reported poor earnings results in mid-November, suggesting that retailers were having trouble persuading shoppers to make purchases.

"We know that they still have a savings account that's greater than last year, so if they choose to spend, they can," Terry Lundgren, chief executive of Macy's, said in an interview Friday.

Lundgren said the approximately 15,000 shoppers who visited his flagship store in New York City's Herald Square gave him confidence about how the rest of the holiday season would shape up for the department store. He said sales were strong in items such as active apparel, women's dresses, handbags and cosmetics gift sets.

One data point from the NRF survey that might be reason for optimism in the retail industry: The 151 million people who reported shopping this weekend was a significantly greater number than the 136 million who said just weeks ago that they planned to shop during this time period. The trade group said this was perhaps a sign that it's getting easier to browse deals online and complete transactions on a mobile device - a process that was rather clunky on most sites just a few years ago.