Zhitong Financial APP learned that the latest shopping data over the weekend showed that more US consumers chose to extend the holiday shopping season and shop ahead of time because of concerns about the COVID-19 epidemic and supply chain bottlenecks. At the same time, retailers are also making promotions more fragmented, which gives consumers another reason to start shopping earlier.

These developments could cause some trouble for investors if this trend affects sales in the fourth quarter and causes results to fall short of expectations. For years, Black Friday after the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States has informally marked the beginning of the holiday shopping season, and the shopping spree usually lasts until the end of December. Black Friday is also one of the busiest shopping days of the year in the United States. Sales at online and brick-and-mortar retailers reached $8.9 billion last Friday, down from a record of about $9 billion on Black Friday in 2020, according to Adobe Inc Analytics. This is the first time that this figure has been reversed compared with the previous year. The latest survey by the American Retail Federation (National Retail Federation) even found that 61 per cent of consumers started buying holiday gifts before Thanksgiving and 28 per cent of holiday shopping was completed in early November.

Retail consultancy Sensormatic Solutions found that visits to brick-and-mortar stores on Thanksgiving Day were 90.4% lower than in 2019, while retailers including BBY.US (BBY), DKS.US (Dick), KSS.US (Cole), M.US (Macy's), Target Corp (TGT.US) and Walmart Inc (WMT.US) all decided to close their stores during Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile, this year's Black Friday, retail store traffic is 28.3% lower than it was in 2019.