Forget Black Friday, retailers are looking for a little Christmas miracle with last-minute Christmas shoppers hitting the stores today. The AP explains, "For stores, this 11th-hour dash caps the best holiday season since 2007, and possibly the best ever. With Christmas falling on a Saturday this year, Friday is a holiday for most workers. That allowed shoppers to hit the stores first thing in the morning." Burning up your cash today, celebrating Baby Jesus tomorrow—Christmas, it's a helluva holiday!
Fashion industry research analyst Marshal Cohen declared, "I'm calling it Fantastic Friday, because I really do think it's going to be one of the busiest days of the year." And many stores have been open for 24 hours this week—Toys R Us will have been open for 88 hours straight when it closes at 10 p.m. tonight. The National Retail Federation expects this year's holiday shopping to be up 3.3% to $451 billion from last year. Online sales appear to be up 15% over last year, at over $36 billion this year.
The store manager at the Union Square Best Buy told NBC New York that there were 300 shoppers in the store this morning, plus another 100 orders for pick-up that were made online.
