Eyewitness News Stops by J&R

With the holiday season now in full swing, Channel 7’s Eyewitness News sent their reporter, Art McFarland, down to J&R to report on the impact this year’s Black Friday had on retailers. Online shopping was up 35% this Black Friday in comparison to last year.

Today is “Cyber Monday”, historically, a day when office workers were disposed to use their company’s broadband internet connection to shop for items they weren’t able to find on Black Friday. Online retailers, like J&R, encouraged the behavior by offering deep discounted prices online for the first Monday after Thanksgiving. In recent years, with the spread of broadband connections in residents, more online shopping has been accomplished from home computers. Cyber Monday promotions have continued to extend public interest in early holiday shopping.

Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey A. Fowler reported that, “Cyber Monday, a term coined by the National Retail Federation in 2005 as the online equivalent to Black Friday, isn’t the largest online shopping day of the year. Last year that was Dec. 9 —closer to the deadline for shipping purchases by Christmas—while Cyber Monday came in third, according to comScore. On Dec. 9, 2008, $887 million in online sales were posted.

The influence of Cyber Monday, however, has grown as more retailers try to shift online shopping to earlier in the season, by piling on more discounts earlier in the season.”

Here, at J&R, we’re increasingly finding that shoppers have researched their purchases online before they enter the stores. Todd Bergman, one of our department managers here, explains that people “still need to hold it, touch it and feel it” when it comes to shopping in physical retail locations.

And in case you missed it, you check out the previous report that ABC 7 did at J&R and the holiday season here.

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