Black Friday, Holiday Shopping Season | featured news

Retail employees launch Change.org petitions against Black Friday sales starting on Thanksgiving, saying it cuts into family celebrations.

It used to be just called Thanksgiving. Now the day is increasingly called Black Friday Eve or Black Thursday, as retailers double down on ever-earlier opening hours for the kickoff of the holiday shopping season.

Amazon launched its Black Friday deals store, joining its rivals who are looking to get an early start on attracting holiday shoppers.

Uh-oh. Oklahoma's attorney general says the hot Black Friday deals could violate state law because many are offered at below cost, The Oklahoman reports. In an opinion published Dec. 13, Attorney General Scott Pruitt said offering items for sale below cost violates the unfair sales act. "Cost" is defined as the invoice or replacement cost to the retailer plus a 6% markup, the newspaper says.

Retailers’ midnight openings last week brought in customers, most big chains said they were pleased with their Black Friday sales, and the November revenue increases at stores open at least a year came in just where analysts had expected, reports showed Thursday.

Groupon Inc sold more than 650,000 holiday deals between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, an increase of 500 percent compared with last year, Chief Executive Officer Andrew Mason said in a blog post on Wednesday.

A woman who says she doused other deal-hunting shoppers with pepper spray at a Porter Ranch Wal-Mart turned herself in to police Friday night and was later released. About 20 people suffered minor injuries after a woman fired pepper spray into a crowd Thursday night before leaving the store with her purchase of an Xbox game console, authorities said. The injured, including children, complained of minor skin and eye irritation and sore throats.

With the intensity of Black Friday shopping starting to fade, store chains know they are under pressure to keep the sales momentum going as they enter the next phase of a competitive holiday shopping season.

When IBM projected that 15% of Black Friday online sales this year would transact via mobile, a lot of analysts and bloggers, not to mention unprepared retailers, scoffed. To many, it seemed too huge of a jump — after all, as recently as 2009 less than 1% of online sales came from mobile.

Millions of Americans jammed stores Friday, supporting analysts' prediction that Black Friday sales would be better than last year's despite the down economy.