Black Friday online sales on track to hit record high: What are people buying?
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(NEW YORK) — People haven’t only been filling their plates this Thanksgiving weekend — it also seems they’ve been filling their online shopping carts.
Black Friday online shopping this year is on pace to break a record with between $10.7 billion and $11 billion in sales, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracks U.S. e-commerce data.
As of Friday evening, spending on online shopping was up more than 8% compared to last year, according to Adobe.
The record pace of Black Friday buying follows record-setting online shopping on Thanksgiving itself, the analytics firm said. Consumers spent a record $6.1 billion online on Turkey Day — up nearly 9% compared to a year ago, according to Adobe.
What are people buying this Black Friday?
Adobe said deep discounts are likely fueling the online spending spree, including discounts on toys of more than 27% off the listed price. Toys have seen a 178% boost in online Black Friday sales so far, compared to an average day in October.
Other popular items on Black Friday include makeup and skin care sets, LEGO sets, “Wicked” toys, Bluetooth speakers, TVs, patio heaters and air fryers, according to Adobe.
Increasingly, online shopping is happening on smaller screens. More than half of all online sales on Black Friday — 57.6% — were on mobile screens, according to Adobe. That’s up from 55.5% last year.
(NEW YORK) — Throughout the country, once bustling business districts have turned into ghost towns. The pandemic has shown that many jobs can be done remotely. Now some major U.S. cities are breathing new life into empty office buildings by converting them into housing. Notable cities that are part of this trend include New York, Austin, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Boston.
The office vacancy rate is 20.1% in the U.S., according to Moody’s. That’s a 30-year high, with more than 900 million square feet of office space empty — enough to fill New York City’s One World Trade Center 300 times.
Amazon, Citigroup, Walmart, and UPS are among the major companies now requiring employees to spend more time in the office. Some companies are pulling out all the stops to entice workers back. Amenities may include massage rooms, health care services, and on-site personal gyms.
However, most experts agree that hybrid and remote work is here to stay. “Companies don’t need office space in the way that they needed office space 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago,” Evan Horowitz, executive director of The Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University, said. “Remote work has just transformed that landscape.”
Major cities across the country, including Boston, Austin, and Chicago, are seeing office vacancies at or near record highs. In San Francisco, more than 22% of offices are currently empty, a significant increase from about 9% in 2019.
Some cities are now at risk of falling into what is known as the “economic doom loop.” High vacancy rates can cause property values to plummet, decreasing tax revenue. This decrease in revenue affects funding for essential services such as schools, police and sanitation, ultimately making these cities less desirable places to live.
Horowitz says Boston is more vulnerable to falling into an “economic doom loop” than other major cities because of its unique s tax structure.
“Boston is closer to crisis mode than other cities because it is so dependent on taxes from commercial real estate, twice as dependent as virtually any other city in the country,” Horowitz said. The loss of commercial tenants is having a ripple effect on area businesses.
When Dave Savoie bought his favorite bar and grill, Silvertone, in 2016 he said it was like a dream come true.
The downtown Boston establishment was popular with the business crowd. Office workers made up 50% of Savoie’s customers, but all that changed with the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I used to call them suits,” Savoie said. “You know, the office guys, the finance guys. And this was their place. [Now] they work from home. If people come to the city now, they work a maximum three days a week.”
It proved too much for Silvertone and, after 27 years, eight of them under Savoie’s ownership, the bar announced “last call” in May.
Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu, who is up for reelection next year, is taking steps to address the situation. She is implementing tax breaks and zoning changes to transform unwanted office space into much-needed housing.
“We have about 500 housing units that are now in the pipeline to be converted out of formerly vacant office buildings,” Wu told ABC News. “We’re taking city buildings like libraries that need renovations and adding housing on top of that and making it faster than ever before through zoning and other city regulatory processes to get your building built and to get those shovels in the ground. The more that downtown is a residential, thriving, busy neighborhood, just like every other one of our neighborhoods, the more everyone benefits.”
The idea is that business districts will be reimagined as vibrant 24/7 neighborhoods that seamlessly blend work, living, dining and entertainment. This holistic approach aims to create a dynamic community where daily life and work coexist, fostering a rich, interconnected lifestyle.
“There are lots of ways to build a vibrant downtown that doesn’t involve the central role of office buildings,” Horowitz said. “It could be apartments, it could be lab space. There are lots of other things you can do with land that makes people want to go downtown and enjoy themselves.”
Many cities are already converting office space into housing, with Cleveland leading the way — 11% of its office inventory is currently undergoing this transformation. Similar projects are also taking place in Cincinnati, Houston, and New York, where the iconic Flatiron office building is set to be transformed into luxury condominiums. “This is a challenge that’s affecting every city in America,” Wu said. “And in Boston, we’re showing that it’s also an opportunity.”
That “opportunity” is something David Greaney is seizing on. At a time when many real estate investors are looking to sell their office buildings, Greaney and his firm Synergy are buying them up, at a deep discount. Synergy currently owns 35 properties in the Greater Boston area – four of them were bought in just the past 12 months.
Greaney says the worst is over in terms of office vacancies, and he is positive about the future of cities. “The great thing about cities is that cities evolve, and I certainly think that our cities will evolve,” Greaney said. “You may see more residential uses, more hospitality or institutional uses, but the office component of downtowns, I believe, will continue to be a very big factor.”
Working out of one of the same buildings Greaney recently bought, small business owners and brothers Michael and Emilio Ruggeri are betting on a comeback for Boston’s downtown.
For three decades they have been serving breakfast and lunch to the office crowd at their Archie’s NY Deli. Office workers accounted for nearly 80% of their business pre-pandemic, but that number has since dwindled to about 50%.
“We’ve been doing more deliveries,” said Emilio Ruggeri. “The construction guys have actually kept us going.”
They’ve also reduced their staff, trimmed their menu and shortened their hours to make ends meet, confident that things will turn around.
“I’m an eternal optimist,” said Michael Ruggeri. “The buildings are way too expensive to just stay empty. Someone’s going to take over the space, so we’re hopeful.”
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. government is set to release new inflation data on Wednesday, offering a fresh look at price increases little more than a week after the issue appeared to help former President Donald Trump win re-election.
Inflation has cooled dramatically since a peak of 9% attained in 2022, now hovering near the Federal Reserve’s target rate of 2%.
The slowdown of price increases has coincided with robust economic growth, establishing the twin conditions necessary for the U.S. to achieve a “soft landing.”
Economists expect prices to have risen 2.6% over the year ending in October. That figure would mark a slight uptick from the annual rate of 2.4% recorded during the previous month.
Still, policymakers at the Fed forecast that inflation will inch downward toward normal levels next year, and reach the central bank’s target rate in 2026, according to projections released in September.
The Fed cut interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point last week. The move came two months after the Fed cut its benchmark interest rate a half of a percentage point, dialing back its fight against inflation since it began in 2021.
The Fed is guided by a dual mandate to keep inflation under control and maximize employment. In theory, lower interest rates help stimulate economic activity and boost employment.
While the central bank’s concern about inflation has receded in recent months, a renewed focus on the labor market has risen to the fore. Employment has continued to grow but expansion has slowed in recent months. The unemployment rate has ticked up from 3.7% to 4.1% this year.
“We continue to be confident that with an appropriate recalibration of our policy stance, strength in the economy and labor market can be maintained with inflation moving sustainably down to 2%,” Fed Chair Jerome Powell said at a press conference in Washington, D.C., last week.
Even as inflation has slowed, that progress hasn’t reversed a leap in prices that dates back to the pandemic. Since President Joe Biden took office in 2021, consumer prices have skyrocketed more than 20%.
The price hikes appeared to fuel support for Trump in last week’s election. More than two-thirds of voters say the economy is in bad shape, according to the preliminary results of an ABC News exit poll.
However, Trump’s proposals of heightened tariffs and the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants could rekindle rapid price increases, some experts previously told ABC News.
When asked last week about the Fed’s potential response to Trump’s policies, Powell said the central bank would make its decisions based on how any policy changes could impact the economy.
“In the near term, the election will have no effects on our policy decisions,” Powell said on Thursday. “We don’t know what the timing and substance of any policy changes will be. We therefore don’t know what the effects on the economy will be.”
“We don’t guess, we don’t speculate and we don’t assume,” Powell added.
(NEW YORK) — A federal appeals court on Friday rejected TikTok’s bid to overturn a law banning the platform unless the company finds a new owner. The defeat inches the apps closer to a U.S. ban, which is set to take effect on Jan. 19.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
