the stores that they see and go in to and each research are even in that area. so he said to me twice that they might not even get to all of the stores on that list. we assume that what they re doing is an honest attempt to say these stores pause you can see the print ads. that s how i do it. i look, too. you can see whether they are saying merry christmas or not. respectfully, bill. i m a retail analyst. they are trying to channel check. which is what i do all year long. especially during the holiday season. what. channel check. go in the stores and lock at product. see how things are selling and see what type of promotions are there if you are not going to all of those stores that are on your list, or at least if you are not branching out to different areas, then you are not doing it accurate check. as a consumer, i will go to the christmassy store i can mr. wallen, and if i see a store that refuses to say merry christmas because if somebody says happy holidays to say i w
spent on mobile devices alone. five men has been arrested. more on all of those coming up. lets get back to black friday for a minute. shoppers are busy hunting for those deals both online and in stores. thanksgiving day of sales of electronics have exceeded. our retail analyst, author of black market billions joining us now. it looks like it is really good here. what will it look like come january 1st. what will your crystal ball say? if i had a crystal ball, i will be a billionaire right now. based on what we have seen, more people are shopping online which is what people have been saying all year. according to pay personnel
42 past the hour. welcome back. no thanksgiving newscast would be complete without talking about shopping deals out there for the holidays. joining us now is retail analyst and author of the book black market billions. good to see you. happy thanksgiving. so previous holiday seasons let s get rid of them. what are we looking at this year? the big number is 383 excuse me. it s almost a billion dollars worth of merchandise that s going to be being sold over the holidays. national retail federation there s a lot of merchandise that s going to be sold over the next couple hours here over black friday, thanksgiving going into black friday. mostly people aren t necessarily going into the stores shopping. they re doing a lot of the shopping online. so paypal came out with a study that said people started shopping as of september 30th. so it s not really even black
there are new numbers that show most americans were in a spending mood this holiday shopping season. an analysis by mastercard showing that spending exceeded 7.9% over last year. mastercard says cheaper gas prices now at around $2.00 a gallon nationally helped fuel holiday spending. shoppers say 72 cents of every dollar saved on fuel was used on gifts. we re joined by a retail analyst at h-squared research. this is really interesting. we knew that e-commerce numbers would go up. that s sort of been the trend. but furniture? right. we saw the numbers that people were feeling more confident now,
federation. i want to bring in our shopping expert. retail analyst at h squared research. great to see you. great to see you too. so half of the people in this country have already started their holiday shopping? yeah. what s that mean for the season? it s a surprising statistic. it means significant things here. what people are doing the reason why they re going out there and shopping early is because some of the older merchandise is less expensive. you have all these clearance sales going on. i don t know if you ve been out. in some cases there are discounts of up to 60% and people are waiting for the newer merchandise to go on sale on black friday. remember the old commercial from amex a couple back in the 80s. don t leave home without it? right now that s referring to your mobile devices. everyone is going out and either shopping online or shopping via their mobile devices. you are seeing about 47% of people going online and shopping. half the reason why, too, is bec