Online Black Friday Sales Bring In Record $9.1 Billion
Full Video Transcript Below:
J.D. DURKIN: So I assume it's not a big surprise to you that according to Adobe, consumers spent a record $9.1 billion in online shopping during the pandemic. Seems like you got a bit of a taste to the brick and mortar side of things, but I can't imagine those numbers are very much of a surprise considering the sales, the opportunities for consumers to not necessarily go to an amazing mall like you were at and instead say, I'm going to wear my comfy sweats and sit on my couch and order what I want from my phone.
MARTIN BACCARDAX: It's hard to draw any hard conclusions, I think, to some degree, isn't it, J.D..? Because we had, we'll probably get into this later in the program, but the record numbers for sports viewing over the weekend, which would tend to suggest that people stayed at home, the record numbers that you allude to with respect to online shopping would suggest that people were also staying at home. But I think there's a hybrid sort of conclusion to some degree that we can look through in the sense that there were probably a lot of purchases that were made on mobile phones, and the Adobe Analytics data seems to support that which were then collected at the brick and mortar stores themselves. And then more shopping took place as a result of that.
That's probably exactly what retailers would like to see, that sort of like draw you in online and then bring you to the shop in physical form so that you can buy some more things. So if that was the case, I think retailers will be very pleased with the outcome, but the numbers seem good. The traffic was good. The Transport Security Administration actually J.D. said a couple of hours ago that they screened 2.56 million passengers yesterday alone and that's the highest total since 2019. So people are traveling, people are shopping, people are watching sport. In other words, J.D., we are returning to normal levels of economic and commercial activity that we experienced prior to the pandemic, and that couldn't be better news for the biggest economy in the world.
