Some stores started their Black Friday sales earlier than ever this year -- and the retail industry expected sales to top last year by as much as 5%. But that didn't happen. In fact, just the opposite happened, as sales dropped from $57.4 billion in 2013 to only $50.9 billion this year. That's a significant drop of $6.5 billion, or about 11.3%.
Why did this happen? Are all the social media campaigns against Black Friday having an effect? Are internet sales cutting into in-store sales this year? Or is this indicative of a public with less money to spend this holiday season? We won't know if that last reason is true or not for another couple of weeks, but I suspect both of the first two had at least some effect.
What do you think? Are the biggest days of Black Friday over -- or is this just a bad year?
