After personally mulling around Friday and finding shops in general dead, dead, dead (as well as not buying a single gift myself knowing everything will be marked down another 50% two weeks hence), the National Retail Federation is claiming traffic was up big time. Some ‘analytics firm’ called ShopperTrak is complicit in the claim, along with Comscore (which missed Google traffic by a mile not long ago) in the online front.

I’ve also heard reports that a certain toy store in New York, which had a line around the block a year ago, had one starting just inside the door this last Friday. Same goes for a certain high end jewelry store.

I can only assume the above named organizations are now taking their cues from the National Association of Realtors (as well as hiring tons of now out-of-work analysts from S&P and Moody’s), or they are surveying nothing but Wal-mart locations. And if the comments from this article are any indication, there are plenty of other people not buying the goods or the bullshit either.

UPDATE: “Indeed, all New York City seemed to be on sale.”

Nielsen has posted some mixed statistics regarding Black Friday’s online shopping results. It’s mixed because while traffic growth was roughly 10% year-over-year for the same day, it was 12% the previous year. Adam Ostrow also noted growth of 27% back in 2004 - he deferred to maturation of the internet.

I don’t think the results were impressive enough, and since Nielsen chose to stuff this report under “PR” they had to do a little song and dance. The show tune was the week-on-week results they presented. Comparing online sales on the Friday prior to Thanksgiving to the Friday after Thanksgiving is about as useless as it gets.