Amazon Records Biggest Ever Black Friday Weekend Sales

Key Takeaways

• Amazon has announced that this year has been their biggest Thanksgiving ever, though specific sales figures have not been released.
• Independent retailers selling through Amazon have seen total sales topping $1 billion across the four day shopping extravaganza.
• Overall shopping numbers rose from last year, with online Black Friday sales up 2.3% from last year and Cyber Monday figures 5.8% higher
• In store retail was an even bigger winner from the weekend, with 123 million people doing some in-person shopping.
• It goes against the recent trend, with many analysts forecasting significant consumer weakness going into the Q4 holiday shopping season.

Well it seems all the bad news around inflation and a potential recession hasn’t damaged the consumers eagerness to score a Black Friday deal. Amazon has announced that they’ve experienced their biggest ever Thanksgiving weekend, throwing cold water on the idea that consumers are wary of an upcoming recession.

The shopping holiday has become a major part of Thanksgiving weekend, and despite suggestions that the deals aren’t maybe quite as good as they’re made out to be, it still represents a boom period for online retailers.

As well as the well known Black Friday sales, the weekend is also capped off with Cyber Monday sales. This year, Amazon’s most popular items are reported to have been Apple AirPods and Nintendo Switches, as well as their own range of home technology such as Echo Dot smart speakers and FireTV sticks.

While Amazon hasn’t announced exactly how much revenue they generated over the weekend, they did say that independent retailers selling through Amazon made over $1 billion in sales over the shopping weekend.

That’s big business.

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Black Friday figures remained strong despite economic headwinds

The headline is that the demand from shoppers remained high at the Black Friday shopping events this year. Online spend on Black Friday this year hit $9.12 billion, up 2.3% from the same time last year, while Cyber Monday figures were even stronger showing a 5.8% increase from 2021.

But it wasn’t just online stores who improved their numbers over last year. After a number of years where online shopping was pretty much the only option, in person retail has come back with a vengeance. The National Retail Federation (NRF) has conducted polling and research which suggests that 196.7 million people shopped over the Thanksgiving weekend.

That’s 17 million more than in 2021.

Not only that, but the bulk of them – 123 million – made their purchases in person, rather than online. NRF President Matthew Shay said that the weekend “is turning out to be even bigger than we expected.”

It’s some welcome positive news in a sea of negativity. For almost the entirety of 2022 we’ve been hearing that a recession is on the horizon. Even Jeff Bezos himself has stated that it’s likely time to “batten down the hatches’ and prepare for one, and yet it appears that consumers are still out and spending money.

This adds further context to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s decision to not yet call the start of an official recession. While the traditional definition of two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth has already been met, there have been other pieces of economic data that haven’t looked quite so bad.

Consumer spending figures have been one, but it had been widely thought that these were likely to slow as the year has gone on. The latest figures on this from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis are due to be announced today.

In addition to consumer spending, the unemployment rate has remained low, home prices have stayed high and consumer confidence has been stable as well. So, it’s by no means all doom and gloom and the latest from Black Friday seems to support that conclusion.

When did Black Friday Start?

Black Friday has become one of the most important dates in the calendar for the e-commerce sector, but where did it all start? While it might seem like a fairly modern phenomenon, legend has it that the origins of the shopping event can be traced back to 1950s Philadelphia.

The day after Thanksgiving would see massive crowds of shoppers head into the city ahead of the Army-Navy football game which was held on the Saturday after thanksgiving every year. The name was apparently coined by police, who weren’t allowed to have the day off and had to work extra long shifts in order to control the huge crowds.

It became a major event on the shopping calendar in Philly, but wouldn’t catch on around the rest of the country until the late 1980’s.

At that point it was latched on to by retailers all across the country. With the day moving away from being a Philadelphia phenomenon, the concept behind the name changed as well. The idea of Black Friday morphed into denoting the time of year when retailers’ financials finally went from ‘red to black’.

In accounting terminology, it meant that this weekend marked the date where they were finally able to turn a profit, i.e. move their accounts ‘ into the black’.

How does Black Friday impact Amazon investors?

As a public company Amazon needs to provide updates to investors on a regular basis, however Black Friday and Cyber Monday fall part way through the financial quarter. Because of that, we won’t get a full breakdown of the financial impact of the holiday period until Q1 2023, when the Q4 2022 figures are released.

Even so, the positive news stories have been a boost for the Amazon stock price which is up 4.46% over the last two days trading.

The upbeat story stands in stark contrast to the Q3 guidance from many companies, which suggested that the Q4 period was likely to be challenging. It remains to be seen whether the Thanksgiving weekend is simply an anomaly, or a sign that the economic headwinds might not be quite as bad as expected.

How can investors take advantage of Black Friday?

Well this year has obviously come and gone, but trends such as Black Friday are one the major ways our AI can give investors an upper hand. For many of our Investment Kits, our AI analyzes vast amounts of historical data to ascertain which stocks and assets are likely to perform best in the coming week.

This can take into account events such as Black Friday, while also analyzing other data that could have an impact, like prevailing interest rates, the level of volatility in the market and much, much more.

One example is our Emerging Tech Kit. For this, our AI predicts the risk adjusted performance across four tech verticals, and then automatically adjusts the positions based on these projections.

These four verticals are large cap tech stocks, growth tech stocks, tech ETFs and cryptocurrencies via public trusts. So, as a hypothetical, non real life example, with Black Friday coming up, our AI could predict that based on historical data that Amazon would be a good position to take in that Kit. We’ll see whether that’s the case next year!

Download Q.ai today for access to AI-powered investment strategies.