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SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Retailers all over California are getting ready for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, which is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. The start of the holiday shopping season is key for retailers. Some make up to 40% of their annual sales during this period.
Last year, despite a difficult economy, shoppers in the U.S. Spent a record $11.4 billion at retail stores and malls. This year should be no different.
Sanjay Varshney is the dean of the College of Business at California State University, Sacramento.
He says, "I think this year, once again, the retail sales is going to be promising in my opinion because people are doing better than last year. The consumer confidence is definitely higher this year compared to last year. The election's over so the election outcome clearly has allowed some of the clouds to dissipate and a lot of the uncertainty that was there last month is slowly disappearing. So i think people in general are feeling fairly optimistic and bullish."
And so are the retailers. In what is being called "Black Friday Creep," several stores, including Toys-R-Us, Wal-mart, Target and K-mart are opening Thanksgiving night to get a jump on Black Friday sales. Of course, all this spending is good news for the state of California, which gets the sales tax revenue. And this year, they'll get tax revenue from some online sales. A law requiring many e-merchants to tax customers went into effect in September.
