Predicting Black Friday Sales Is a Losing Game

Reading the tea leaves hoping to produce an accurate forecast of Black Friday weekend sales essentially always makes for a good story that turns out to be wrong. That doesn’t stop nearly everyone from trying.

As the good folks at fivethirtyeight.com pointed out earlier this week, and Bloomberg columnist Barry Ritholtz has argued for years, the early forecasts and “instant analysis” that is usually announced on Sunday evening has a very poor record of being right. Last year, the National Retail Federation (NRF) forecast that sales fell 11% on Black Friday weekend. The U.S. Department of Commerce data, released in early 2015, showed that retail sales actually rose about 4% during November and December.

Partly the inaccuracy is due to the methodology. A poll-taker stops you in a shopping mall on Black Friday (or before in most cases), and asks you to compare how much you spent on holiday gifts last year with what you plan to spend this year. As Ritholtz says:

You have no idea what you spent on holiday shopping last year. You have no idea what you are going to spend on holiday shopping this year. The net result of comparing one made-up number with a second made-up number is a random outcome lacking any relationship to actual spending.

Another problem is that the holiday shopping season now includes an extended Black Friday weekend, with sales typically starting a week or more before the day itself. Then there are online sales which are becoming a bigger factor every year.

And what do retailers themselves have to say? Here’s what the latest report from Retail Metrics has to say:

[Third-quarter r]etail revenue performance has been even more disappointing [than profit performance]. Third quarter retail sales growth has been just 2.3%. Almost two-thirds (64%) of reporting retailers have missed revenue estimates while just 33% have surprised on the upside. Forward guidance has been very cautious and predominantly negative. … 4Q15 retail earnings growth expectations have been pared 120 basis points in the past week and by 210 bp in the last 2 weeks to now stand at a meager 1.4% increase.

And how do the analysts at Retail Metrics read the tea leaves? Carefully:

With all of that being said, we would not read too much into what we expect to be sluggish Black Friday weekend traffic levels. Consumers are increasingly making purchases online and from smart phones. Black Friday deals have materialized earlier this year, have been or will be online (see Wal-Mart) earlier this season, which will likely siphon further traffic away from brick and mortar chains. Most retailers, with a few exceptions such as J.C. Penney, have held the line on pushing Thanksgiving openings earlier this year which should limit the spillover of Black Friday sales into Thanksgiving.

We expect deals very similar to Black Friday levels to persist throughout the Holiday shopping period. Cold weather apparel and seasonal inventories are heightened heading into the holidays due to obstinately warm weather across the entire country. Consumers are going to be in for some excellent deals across the specialty apparel and department store landscape in Holiday 2015. The key question for investors will be to what extent are margins eroded from unplanned promotions.

In fact, some variation of that conclusion could be used year after year. That has become the new normal for Black Friday retail sales.

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