Customers Spent a Record-Shattering $6.22 Billion During Black Friday
Whether you finally bought that perfect sweater at a price you could stomach, refreshed your gizmo collection, or grabbed the family some holiday presents on discount, odds are you dropped some cash on a Black Friday deal last week. You weren't alone. 2018 was the best year in the completely made up shopping event’s history. A record $6.22 billion was spent on Black Friday this year, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracks sales at 80 of the top 100 retailers in the U.S. That total is 24 percent larger than the $5.03 billion pulled in during last year’s Black Friday. Adobe expects that customers will spend another $7.8 billion today on Cyber Monday deals, which would make it the largest online shopping day in the U.S.’s history.
The goods news is that consumers shopping in record numbers reflects the general good mood of U.S. stores. The retail sector in general is rebounding after years of what felt like unrecoverable collapse that resulted in thousands upon thousands of store closures. But financial reports at major retailers like Nordstrom, Target, and Walmart are trending in a positive direction. Setting the record for the biggest online shopping day is, as you’d expect, a good way to keep that momentum up. The upside for real-life people who don’t twirl their mustaches while clutching bags full of gold coins is more jobs and potentially higher wages so that they can turn around and buy their own stuff during Black Friday.
But all this record-setting spending doesn’t happen painlessly. It’s no coincidence that employees at Amazon warehouses around the world chose this weekend to strike. Workers demonstrated outside Amazon’s facilities in Spain, Germany, France, and the U.K., according to Bloomberg. Employees held up signs that said “we are not robots” to protest working conditions in the facilities. Earlier this year, Business Insider reported that some Amazon warehouse employees were allegedly so concerned about leaving their stations even for a bathroom break that they peed inside the nearest trash cans. (Amazon denied these claims.)
This problem isn’t exclusive to Amazon, either. In an investigation released last month, the New York Times found that pregnant employees working in a warehouse that shipped Verizon products claimed that they were forced to continue carrying heavy boxes—in some cases resulting in miscarriages. These are the sort of working conditions brought on by an increasingly demanding retail environment.
In response to the global protests, a representative for Amazon said that the majority of its workers did not strike and added that the company has created “75,000 permanent jobs in Europe since 2010.” This is the other side effect of a recovering economy: in its report on the improved retail environment, the Associated Press noted that wages for cashiers went up 5.4 percent. But the AP reports that it wasn’t just cashiers who saw a wage bump. This year, after years of going without them, executives at retailers finally got their bonuses back. A happy Black Friday, indeed.
