Black Friday officially opens the holiday shopping season. And it represents the first test of consumers’ willingness to spend in the face of inflation at its highest in decades. Queues at the department stores bode well for the desire to buy, but family budgets decimated by the high cost of living and high energy prices fuel many doubts as to whether the season will last. However, the first indications are positive.
In the United States, over 166 million Americans will shop over the weekend – from Black Friday to Cyber Monday – a good eight million more than last year. During Thanksgiving Day alone, US consumers spent a record 5.29 billion dollars online, taking advantage of the Thanksgiving after dinner to shop from their sofa with their cell phone.
In Italy, the Black Friday weekend is an opportunity to give Christmas gifts: 52.8% of people will buy them, or one out of two. It is a question, it is the sketch drawn up by Confcommercio, mainly of women (54%), aged between 18 and 34 years (60%), and in the territory of the South (59%) and the North West (53% ). A growing number of Italians – 36.2% compared to 34.9% in 2021 – however declare themselves still undecided, while 11% have decided that they will not buy gifts.