Can stores lure holiday shoppers away from their computers?

How brick-and-mortar locations are trying to keep up with online retailers

Black Friday.
(Image credit: Philip Pacheco/Getty Images)

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Black Friday was more like blah Friday this year, said Leslie Patton at ­Bloomberg​, as online shopping and weeks of deep discounting continued to erode the post-Thanksgiving doorbuster rush. Foot traffic to stores dropped 6 percent, while e-commerce spending was up 16 ­percent — and that was before deal-hungry consumers set another record with $9 billion in purchases on Cy­ber Mon­day, the online retail spend-a-thon. As Ama­zon's sales surged, some shoppers actually mourned the loss of the "frenzy that once spawned human stampedes, anxiety, and carnival-like atmospheres inside shopping malls." Retailers are "trying everything they can to keep up with Ama­zon" as well as "dozens of buzzy e-commerce startups," said Sap­na Mahesh­wari and Michael Cork­ery at The New York Times. They are no longer looking for the same flood of customers checking out the aisles. In fact, the "ideal transaction" for many big retail chains like Nord­strom and Kohl's today is "a consumer who browses online" but visits stores to buy the merchandise, cutting shipping costs and reducing the chance of a return. For now, the strategy of attracting those shoppers is working, but it may be a "short-lived" victory. Whatever stores do, Ama­zon always seems to respond "with new ways of delivering inexpensive items as quickly and conveniently as possible."

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