This year’s Black Friday event saw the ongoing trend continue of shoppers moving online for their retail therapy rather than leave the comfort of their sofa. In the US, footfall at shops on Black Friday fell by over 52% compared with last year, as Americans shunned the malls and instead queued up online, according to preliminary data from Sensormatic Solutions. In an earlier forecast, Sensormatic Solutions believes that retail traffic in shops will be down between 22 to 25% for the key six weeks of the holiday season.
In contrast, online shopping surged nearly 22% to hit a new record, according to data from Adobe Analytic. Shoppers spent over USD9bn, making Black Friday 2020 the second-largest online spending day in history in the US, second only to last year’s Cyber Monday. This year's Cyber Monday, which was yesterday, is expected to become the largest digital sales day in history, with spending reaching between USD11bn and USD13bn, which equates to a growth of between 15 and 35% from last year.
Over the weekend we also witnessed Trump giving his first interview since Election Day. He told Fox News’s ‘Sunday Morning Futures’ programme that he believed the Department of Justice is ‘missing in action’ regarding apparent election fraud. In the exclusive interview, he said that he had ‘not seen anything’ from the DoJ or the Federal Bureau of Investigation on investigating the 2020 election. ‘You would think if you're in the FBI or Department of Justice, this is the biggest thing you could be looking at’ Trump said, adding 'Where are they? I've not seen anything. They just keep moving along and they go on to the next president'.