We shopped. Retail prices dropped.
In fact, we shopped more than anyone anticipated. Black Friday wasn’t the media-desired apocalypse. It was better than even retail experts predicted. Instead of having a day better named Red Friday, Black Friday sales figures showed some positive signs.
Some. Don’t go jumping for joy, credit cards in hand. There’s plenty of negatives out there as well. First on deck is that we are officially in a recession. According to the wonky folks who rule on such things — the National Bureau of Economic Research — we officially entered one in December 2007 — a couple years after the media first started talking about it.
But recessions aren’t all that surprising. No matter how much the issues of Wall Street, Detroit, Capitol Hill or Baltimore might worry you, we’ve had a few of these before — five since 1980 to be exact. Those include two at the beginning of the 1980s, another starting in July 1990, the dot-com bomb in March 2001 and now. Do the quick math and we average one about every six years. If Obama’s a two-termer, he’s likely to get another one as well, according to those numbers.
Recession is as much an economic event as it is a psychological one. If you are afraid of running out of cash, losing your home or job, you don’t go spending tons of money. Retailers counter with deeper discounts to woo shoppers.
This weekend, that deep discount strategy worked like a charm.
First the good: According to the National Retail Federation’s 2008 Black Friday Weekend survey (Don’t you wish you got paid to come up with stuff like this?), “more than 172 million shoppers visited stores and Web sites over Black Friday weekend, up from 147 million shoppers last year.”
Now the better: Shoppers spent about $372 each on average, a 7.2 percent increase from 2007.
And the best? “Total spending reached an estimated $41.0 billion,” said NRF. Nielsen Online reports online shopping traffic went up 10 percent on Black Friday, too.
Not too shabby for the weekend right before we find out we’re in a recession. It would be cooler still if we beat NRF’s estimate of 2.2 percent increase in sales for the holiday season.
But no sooner was the good news out of the bag, then the bad news came back like you had swallowed bad pork. The stock market, which kicked butt five straight days last week, had its own butt kicked on Monday, “slicing 680 points off the Dow Jones industrial average as Wall Street snapped out of its daydream of a rally and once again faced the harsh reality of a recession,” wrote The Associated Press.
The official recession announcement and some other economic news took a toll. Now we know it, so what? That declaration shouldn’t matter to you. What should matter is you try to keep your job in tough times, don’t spend too much and go on with your life.
‘Tis the season to be, ummm, what’s that again? Oh, jolly. Try it.
